


while we're on the subject, could we change the subject now

by shinealightonme



Series: what useless tools ourselves [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish is alone-some, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Author has a complicated relationship with the city of Los Angeles, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Lawyers, M/M, Minor Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Neighbors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 01:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12643005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: Adam's coworker is worried about his love life. Adam is more worried about his neighbor burning down his apartment.





	while we're on the subject, could we change the subject now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LydiaStJames](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydiaStJames/gifts).



> Written for lydiastjames in thanks for her donation to harvey_fanaid.
> 
> This is a mishmash of two different tumblr prompts (or it was before it spiraled out of control): (1) 'my new romance-obsessed friend asked me who my last date was with and i was too embarrassed to say i've never been on a date so i blurted your name and it turns out they know you' au, and, (2) Neighbors whose windows face each-other and one of them (let's face it, Adam) keeps seeing increasingly weird things.

The last twenty miles of Adam's four hundred mile drive take approximately as long as the rest of the trip put together; he doesn't even live in this city yet and he already hates it.

His GPS goes wonky as he pulls into the driveway, like his phone has caught a glimpse of the apartment building and wants to ask him if he's sure, _really_ sure, that this is it. He shuts off the navigation. It's not like he didn't know the place was a dump.

The landlord is an unpleasant balding man who smokes the entire time he's going over the lease, rattling off conditions and asking Adam three times if he has a dog, like Adam might have acquired one in the last thirty seconds. Adam tunes him out and reads the lease front-to-back; he'd read the copy the landlord had emailed him before he left Stanford, but he's not going to sign this copy without checking it's the same.

It is. He signs his name, and just like that, he has a place to call home.

"You can't park here," the landlord says as he leaves. Apparently that passes for _goodbye_.

Adam spends twenty minutes circling the neighborhood looking for a spot. He ends up six blocks from his apartment with an intimate knowledge of the surrounding streets and a raging headache.

It takes him five trips to get all of his things out of his car and up to his second floor apartment. It's a blessing in disguise -- a very convincing disguise -- that he doesn't own much.

There is, of course, no elevator.

By the time he's moved into his apartment, the long summer day is well and truly over. He flicks on the light and sees his own face reflected at him in the glare of the window, pinched and worn.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Adam Parrish.

-

The next day is Sunday, which means that instead of starting his new job Adam has a day of rest. He spends the morning cleaning the apartment for what is very likely the first time in its existence, scrubbing the shower and washing the linoleum and running out to the store for a vacuum.

He can't get the blinds on his window to close. A cursory inspection reveals that the string running through it is broken and looped around to keep the blinds open.

He shakes his head at the sloppy work but leaves it; he doesn't have the string to fix it right now. Among the furniture he inherited from the last tenant is a four-panel screen to divide the apartment's one room into a bedroom and a living room. He orients it to block the view of the bed from the window, not that there's going to be anything exciting happening in his bedroom.

At least the view out the window isn't as bad as it could be. It overlooks the courtyard -- a dozen half-dead potted trees around a patch of brown crabgrass -- and faces the opposite leg of the building. He notices, a bit sour, that all of his neighbors' blinds are lowered.

One of his neighbors is _opening_ the blinds, actually. Adam doesn't mean to watch, exactly, but he's tired and sweaty and leaning against the open window to breathe in the surprisingly chilly June air, and he just sort of -- ends up watching. His neighbor across the way slides the window open, and he's close enough for Adam to takes in some details, that the guy's about his age, shaved head, black tank, muscular arms.

And then Adam stops idly watching and starts staring in intense disbelief, because the guy sticks his arm out the window and a fucking _raven_ lands on his wrist, like he's Harry Potter, like he's a Disney princess, like --

Like this is a perfectly normal occurrence, because the guy pulls his arm, raven and all, back inside and shuts the window behind him with absolutely no fanfare.

Adam rubs his eyes. His neighbor hasn't bothered to close the blinds, so Adam can still see him and his familiar, sitting on the couch and eating potato chips.

He decides to get back to work.

-

Adam had taken a job at a criminal defense firm knowing it was going to be awful, so when he hates all of their clients and most of the other lawyers, when the partners ignore him and the associates overload him with work, when he spends every beautiful summer evening inside reading until his eyes cross, he can at least console himself with the fact that he was right: his job is awful.

But it pays obscenely well for being his first job after passing the bar, and it gives him access to the impressive names he'll use as references later. He's building up his resume and his contact list and his bank accounts, and in a few years he'll switch over to working for the prosecutor's office and doing the kind of law he went to school for. His job is like his shitty bachelor apartment: it doesn't have to be good, it just has to get him through this part until his actual life starts.

It's not even as pathetic as it sounds, though that may be because it sounds astoundingly pathetic -- but there are pluses to the job. He makes friends with one of the other junior associates, Gansey, who's brilliant and charming in an awkward sort of way and who doodles on Adam's legal pad during conference calls; and with one of the summer interns, Blue, who unironically refers to the partners at the firm as _the enemy_ and may drop the whole "law school" thing any day now in favor of open class warfare.

There are pluses to the shitty bachelor apartment, too. True, he has no kitchen, just a mini-fridge and a hotpot, but he eats two and sometimes three meal a day at the office, so that doesn't really impact his life. There's a grill in the courtyard that no one else ever uses, and the old woman in the room below Adam's has an illicit puppy that she lets Adam pet in exchange for not ratting her out, and they're right across the street from a library. He's never home when the library's open, but it's nice to think he could take advantage of that, someday.

(There's a strip club right by his freeway exit that he drives past every single night; it's _always_ open, and he has zero intention of ever taking advantage of it.)

And not that he'd admit it to anyone, but his favorite thing about the apartment is that it gives him a front row seat to the _unending weirdness_ that is his neighbor's life.

One time Adam spots him flying a remote controlled airplane around his apartment. The raven swerves just in time to avoid a midair collision and lands on his shoulder, squawking a protest directly in his ear. In response, he opens the door, flies the plane outside, and then shuts the door again and goes back to the couch. Adam walks across his room to peer out the other side of his window; the little RC plane is still chugging away, flying relentlessly off into exile, and the guy piloting it isn't even tracking its progress. He's just petting his raven.

One night Adam wakes up at four o'clock, can't fall back asleep; he pulls himself out of bed to get a glass of water, and spots his neighbor in the pre-dawn light, doing pushups on the stairs. Adam watches him for at least two minutes before he snaps out of his sleep-deprived daze and goes back to bed.

Another time, his neighbor gets locked out of his apartment and bangs on the window out of what Adam assumes is annoyance. The entire pane of glass pops out of frame, allowing him to climb in through his window. Adam does not sleep particularly well that night, reconsidering the merits of adopting a secret forbidden guard dog. He has to remind himself that nothing he owns is worth stealing, even if it is stupidly easy to break into these apartments.

The next day, his neighbor pops the glass out of the frame again, this time from the inside, and hops out of the apartment through the empty window frame.

He catches Adam staring at him that time and shrugs, like he's daring Adam to say something about it.

Adam is not above taking a dare.

He flips to a clean page out of his legal pad and scrawls on it, WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST DOORS? and holds it up to his window.

His neighbor smirks at that, grabs the railing, and jumps over it, giving Adam a _goddamn heart attack_ before walking nonchalantly away, past the stairs that are ten feet from his door and that he could have easily walked down if he weren't _the absolute worst_.

So, yeah. Adam has no social life and no down time and no kitchen, but at least he isn't bored.

-

Gansey persuades Adam to go out for drinks after work, with eerily good timing that has to be accidental; Gansey has, by his own admission, never lived paycheck to paycheck. But Adam has, has never done anything _but_ , and the direct deposit lands in his bank account on a Friday with a number that leaves him lightheaded, even after he moves a full fifty percent of it to savings and makes his student loan payment.

So when Gansey comes up to him and says, "let's go out tonight," he agrees. The only other things he has to spend money on are ready-made meals and the cheapest apartment he could find.

He starts to regret taking Gansey up on his invitation somewhere in between the tapas bar and the wine bar and definitely by the time they hit the whiskey and cigar bar that someone thought was a good idea. Adam consoles himself by watching Blue glare with enormous prejudice at one of the many people who just seem to _show up_ around Gansey; in this case, a man who has no goddamn idea how to smoke a cigar but isn't letting that stop him from pontificating on the subject to Blue.

"How do you even _know_ all these people, anyway?" Adam asks, a little too loud and a little too rude. They are, after all, on the third bar of the night.

Gansey laughs and tilts his head back until it's resting on the top of the booth behind him. "Oh, you know." He waves a hand, sloshing something like seventeen dollars of whiskey on Adam's knee. "People! How does anyone know anyone? You know people."

"Not like this," not a crowd of people who can ebb and flow around him on a Friday night, arrivals and departures going unnoticed because the volume and the conversation never change. He hates it, and he's breathtakingly envious of it, and he thinks maybe he hates Gansey a little, too, until Gansey blinks down at his hand and notices the stain on Adam's pants and tries to dab it off with a napkin he dips in someone else's water glass.

"Seriously, who even are these people?" Adam asks again, after they've both laughed themselves tipsy and lost the conversation and moved outside, where it's muggy and smells like exhaust and is marginally quieter.

"Oh, well -- I rowed crew with Evans in New Haven," Gansey says, as offhanded about his Yale education as he is about everything in his charmed life. "Doyle and Richardson work down on the twelfth floor. I met Jenny on Tinder."

A voice in Adam's head that already sounds like Blue asks, pointedly, why the men are _Doyle_ and _Evans_ and _Richardson_ but the woman is _Jenny_ , but then he gets distracted because -- there is no way on earth that Gansey has a girlfriend, not when he looks at Blue the way he looks at Blue.

"Tinder's a dating app," Adam says.

Gansey nods, enthused, like Adam hasn't said the dumbest, most self-evident thing possible. "Yes! Are you on it?"

"No," short, and, "Do you hang out with all of your exes or just the ones you met online?"

"She's not an ex, exactly. We only went on the one date," Gansey says. "You should try it! I can make your profile for you. I'm good at making profiles."

Adam feels compelled to say _yes_ in the same way that he feels compelled to stare at multi-car pile-ups or to stick his hand into open flames; some things are attractive because of how objectively horrifying they are.

He tamps down hard on that impulse, because no amount of catharsis would be worth Gansey's Tinder profile of him existing in the world.

"I'm not looking for a relationship right now," Adam says, and doesn't even sound nauseous, so point, Adam.

"It's a great way to meet people, though. Not just romantically. I've had a lot of dates that don't click, but we still keep in touch."

Adam snorts, because Gansey has clearly never had a bad breakup in his life. Then again, neither has Adam.

"And you're new in town. That's a good way to explore a new place, you know -- ask people to show you their favorite restaurants and museums and hangouts -- "

Adam snorts again, because Gansey has to be the only person in the world to take a Tinder date to a museum. It probably went well. They probably keep in touch.

"I'll pass." Adam sounds mild. He feels mild, he realizes, the night enormous and still around him, and he doesn't have Gansey's life of museum dates and endless wealth and an ever-changing crowd of faces around him, but that's okay. He has his own life, and someday he'll even get to live in it.

"I suppose that's not your style," Gansey ruminates. "You're an old soul, aren't you."

Adam stares down at his drink. He doesn't want to finish it.

"No, I'm just a crabby jerk." He puts his glass down. "Come on, I'm sick of this place. Let's grab Blue and get out of here."

Gansey lights up, because Gansey is madly in love with Blue, and Adam is a little bit, too. They collect Blue before she can shed any mansplainer blood and sneak out the front; they aren't very subtle, stumbling and giggling, but no one follows them.

They walk for what feels like miles -- it's probably a couple of blocks. Gansey gives his wallet to a homeless man. Blue retrieves it, gives him one of Gansey's crisp twenties instead, and an energy bar from one of the deep pockets of her vintage men's coat.

They end up in a bar with a name that's too clever for Adam to remember, where a woman is strumming an acoustic guitar and crooning wordlessly into a microphone.

They settle down in the darkest corner of the room, and Gansey talks. About how much he loved Yale, the generations of scholars building on each other's work, the pursuit of knowledge for the good of mankind; about how much he'd hated leaving and realizing how little good trickled its way out to mankind; about how betrayed he'd felt going back and realizing how little mankind trickled its way into Yale.

"Humankind," Blue corrects him, but it's only by habit.

"That's what I want, though."

"Humankind?" Adam asks, honestly confused.

"No -- yes -- just, _knowledge_ ," Gansey says, like it pains him, and Blue turns her face to look at him with an expression like it pains her, too. _Oh_ , Adam thinks, _well, good for Gansey, then_. "I just -- I want to study, and I love it, and I think if I study the law, well, maybe that can be worth something to someone." He sighs. "That doesn't make any sense, does it?"

It does, though, in some way beyond words, and so Adam can't comfort Gansey in words; he presses a hand against Gansey's face, instead, and Blue does the same on his other side, and then Blue talks. Blue talks about growing up poor, the kind of poor that Adam had craved so desperately because it felt real and possible and yet even further out of his grasp then wealth -- the family that loved their way through power outages and thrift store appliances and summers with no school lunches. Blue talks about the tree in her front yard that was friend and confessor and substitute father alike, about weekends in the woods, about nature as something that anyone could enjoy, regardless of money.

"And it's not right that the rich get to destroy the environment for everyone else." She scowls fiercely, at Adam and Gansey both, as though either of them could refuse her anything. "I'm going to graduate and I'm going to pass the bar and then I'm going to do something about it."

"Yes." Gansey's eyes shine. "Yes, you are," and Adam thinks, _well, good for Blue, then._

It feels like a _moment_ , like time is not just passing but like time is _happening_ in some concrete way it never has before, and Adam is horribly, wretchedly tempted to speak. Memories he keeps neatly tucked away are suddenly vivid, all around him: a dusty country courthouse, the overworked prosecutor who couldn't get the verdict, the public defender that he hated, loathed, because he wasn't ready to hate his father yet.

Adam has never told anyone about that first experience with the law, has never wanted to tell anyone, and he is consumed now with the knowledge that he _could_.

But he won't. Because Gansey collects people. Gansey picks them up from New Haven and the twelfth floor and mediocre first dates, probably makes them all feel like they're something special, like time is really _happening_ to them for the first moment they can remember.

Adam's vision is blurry, and he doesn't say anything beyond his goodbyes. He gets a cab and goes home, sits on his couch in the dark, too tired for sleep. His neighbor is awake, shirtless with the lights on in defiance of the hour, raven fluffing its feathers in irritation, and he's -- shredding paper into tiny pieces, for no earthly reason that Adam can think of.

It's bizarrely entertaining, and so exactly what Adam needed without knowing he needed it, the fantasy he didn't realize he had every time someone dumped a stack of case files and court rulings in front of him: _what if I just destroyed it all_. It feels strangely like a gift, and he accepts it, watches his neighbor shred his way through a ream of paper, and Adam is drunk and whimsical and so, so close to being part of humankind.

Before he goes to sleep he finds a piece of paper of his own, writes FIRE IS BETTER AT DESTROYING EVIDENCE, tapes it to his window and collapses on his bed with his clothes on.

The next morning there's a dick in his neighbor's window, inch-high scraps of paper taped together into a mosaic penis telling Adam to go fuck himself. Adam spends a second being utterly mortified -- what will the _rest_ of the building think -- before he decides that if his neighbor doesn't care, neither does he. He takes down his sign from the night before and rips it into a dozen pieces before throwing it in the recycling bin, a hint of a smile on his face.

-

The mail carrier in Adam's neighborhood has only a tenuous grasp on the concept of time, which is unfortunate when he's expecting a package. Their mailboxes are tiny; anything larger than a number ten envelope gets left out for anyone to grab. Adam hasn't had any packages stolen yet and he _isn't going to_ , dammit.

Saturday's mail appears in between his second and third trips down to the boxes. He locates his package easily enough, and then his eyes fall on the other package that arrived, which is -- 

Adam blinks.

It's a hatchet.

It is clearly, obviously, undeniably a hatchet, wrapped up in brown butcher's paper, RONAN LYNCH and the address written out over the blade, a series of stamps along the handle.

Adam can't say with certainty that it's illegal to send a hatchet through the mail, but it feels like the sort of thing you're supposed to be subtle about.

So the existence of the hatchet-by-mail is a surprise; looking up and seeing his ledge-jumping, window-breaking, paper-destroying neighbor from across the way is the opposite of a surprise. Really, who else was going to get a hatchet mailed to them like a serial killer's birthday present.

"All yours," Adam says, and leaves with his own package, and it's impossible not to fix the name _Ronan Lynch_ in his brain.

-

Adam spends the night of July third in his apartment building's desiccated courtyard, drinking beer and grilling too many hamburgers for one person. It is probably, objectively, a completely depressing way to spend a birthday, but Adam finds it soothing. His presence is required at the firm's firework viewing tomorrow night, and he's dreading it even as he knows he needs the opportunity to network. Gansey has informed him that he and Blue will sneak out with Adam as soon as the partners are drunk. Adam is dreading that too, in a different way, a way that feels horribly like excitement.

All in all, one night to soak up some quiet and peace of mind is the perfect birthday present to himself.

His peace of mind lasts only as long as it takes for Ronan to walk into the courtyard, hatchet dangling from one belt loop and a _live goat_ following him on a leash.

Adam stares.

He can't help it. He is trapped, nightmare-like, by the knowledge that he is about to witness someone _slaughtering a goat_ and unable to do anything to stop it --

Ronan ties the end of the goat's leash to the water meter and walks off.

Adam exhales and shuts his eyes for a solid minute.

When he opens them again, the goat is still there, sniffing judgmentally at the dead grass.

He grabs a piece of lettuce and tosses it in front of the goat.

The goat sniffs at that judgmentally, too, but deigns to eat it.

Ronan comes back as Adam is removing the burgers from the grill. He ditched the hatchet at some point, and Adam is so relieved that he's neither going to be stuck with the goat nor have to witness its bloody demise that he points his spatula at the burgers and asks Ronan, "Want one?"

Ronan glares at him, suspicious. Which makes him either an enormous hypocrite or completely lacking in self-awareness.

Adam forces himself not to justify his question. _He's_ not the weird one, here.

"Sure," Ronan says. He picks up the last burger still on the grill with his bare fingers -- Adam rolls his eyes at the unnecessary machismo -- and puts it on a bun.

He doesn't say thanks, though that would have surprised Adam at least as much as the goat. He just walks off to do whatever the hell it is you do on the westside with a live farm animal. The last thing Adam sees is Ronan breaking off a piece of the burger and feeding it to the goat.

-

The firm rents out a clubhouse on the water for the firework show. There had been some talk of holding the event on a yacht, and Adam had seen his own panicked thought flash across Blue's face: _I will jump overboard and swim to land if I have to spend one second more than necessary with these assholes_. But apparently someone decided the cost of insuring against ocean-based drunken disasters was too high, so hurrah for penny-pinching.

Adam makes his first round of the party as the hors d'oeuvres appear, allows the least overbearing of the associates to steer him around and remind all of the partners who he is. He does all right with the lawyers who are down for shoptalk, but a surprising number of his colleagues rebuff any mention of work, as though they don't all bill sixty or seventy or eighty hours a week.

Adam is horrendous at small talk.

"Shame about the cloud cover."

"Yes."

"Still, maybe it'll burn off."

"Maybe."

"Your glass is looking a little empty there, Parrish."

"Oh," and Adam has somehow finished his drink already. He very quietly asks the bartender for a Coke.

Three more people tell him that it's a shame about the weather, until he starts to wonder if he's expected to apologize for the clouds. But no, surely not; no one at this party is poor enough or ill-bred enough to be held accountable for anything.

He joins a new group chatting over champagne, listens to half a dozen inane observations about the decor and the music and passive-aggressive comments about yachts. When there's a lull in the conversation and someone asks how he's doing, he replies that he's doing well but that it's a shame about the weather, and he gets a chorus of agreements.

Adam wonders if it's possible to be hung over without getting drunk first.

"At least the food is good," a paralegal comments. The servers are coming around now with offerings of hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken wings, corn on the cob, all shaped into artful bite-sized pieces and easily five times as much food as a party their size needs.

Someone's wife -- Adam has lost track -- turns up her nose. "We should have gone with the caterers from the holiday party."

"Nonsense! You have to enjoy burgers," one of the partners says, "there's nothing more American than burgers on a grill."

Adam, whose last experience of grilling burgers ended with an ax-wielding madman coercing a goat into borderline cannibalism, nods in solemn agreement and then excuses himself to go laugh in private.

When Adam rejoins the party, Gansey attaches himself to his side. He's far better at these games than Adam is, but it's hard to resent that too much, because as soon as he charms his way into his audience's good graces he always mentions Adam. He comments on a matter that Adam handled particularly well, or he shares an accomplishment of Adam's from law school (which, _how does he even know_ ), or he repeats one of the observations or jokes that Adam made to him, which have a way of sounding better when Gansey says them. Smarter, and less bitter.

They eat tiny gourmet burgers and drink soda water and nod in agreement, and just as Adam runs out of fake smiles Blue appears in between him and Gansey, like she can _tell._

"Let's go," she whispers, under the sound of the first fireworks of the night.

They sneak out (easy to do when everyone's attention is on the sky) and then Adam has to put his foot down and insist on chivalry, because Blue tries three times to claim the backseat of Gansey's two-door muscle car.

"I'm half your size," Blue scowls. "I don't need as much space as you do, you overgrown man."

"Yup, you're the little lady," Adam drawls, dragging his accent out of hiding, "so'n it's only right you sit up front," and that is the worst possible argument to use on Blue. He doesn't care. It's fun to watch how deep her scowl can go. And he doesn't want to use the argument that would work, that he prefers sitting on the driver's side because he hears better that way. It's not the sort of thing a person shares.

Gansey gets tired of watching them argue before either of them gets tired of arguing, so he rules that it's his car and he says Blue sits up front. Blue only glares horrible recriminations at them for as long as it takes Gansey to get on the freeway, and then he comments, "that wasn't so bad," and Blue and Adam are immediately united in ferocious disagreement with him.

"That was atrocious," Adam says.

"Physically painful," Blue agrees.

"And it was such a shame about the weather."

Blue snorts, and even Gansey laughs, reluctant, "Yeah, okay, socializing with the people you work with is pretty dull. But this is going to be better."

Adam thinks to ask, "where are we going?"

Gansey grins at him in the rear view mirror, "you'll see," and then he _floors_ it.

Adam doesn't see where they're going for ages -- they drive an hour, two hours, east, east, east into the desert; at least leaving while the fireworks were starting means there's fewer cars on the road. Adam thinks in an absent way that he should protest being kidnapped, but it's hard to care about that when Gansey sings along badly with the radio and Blue performs brutally accurate impressions of everyone at the firm.

They make good time to nowhere, and right when they get to nowhere Gansey pulls over on the side of the road and then off of it, into the desert. They crawl along slowly, until the road is out of sight behind them, and then Gansey turns the engine off.

"Come on," he grins, "let's get the fireworks."

By the time Adam has exited the car, Blue is gleefully pawing through the explosives in the trunk.

"Where did you get fireworks?" Adam thinks they're illegal in LA County, though he's never looked into it. Setting off fireworks in your yard -- that's the sort of thing that the person he'd been raised to be would do. Not the sort of thing the person he wants to be would do.

He isn't sure what kind of person sets off fireworks by the roadside in the middle of the desert, except apparently Yale graduates and socialist interns and _hopefully_ people who are _not_ about to get arrested.

"I have a friend who makes his own," Gansey explains.

"You and your friends, Gansey," because he would, he just would. He must have a friend for everything.

They don't get arrested or blown up, though Blue does set several of the fireworks alight at once and they all have to scramble madly to get out of the line of fire when one of them topples over. 

They collapse on their backs on the cold sand and watch the colors light up the sky; they stay on their backs on the cold sand long after the ringing in their ears has cleared.

They could lie on their backs here on the sand all night, Adam thinks, and then he comes to his senses and wanders off into the desert to give Blue and Gansey some space, because that feels like the decent thing to do. Anyone could see where that's going.

He hadn't realized how _cold_ it was, out in the desert at night, even in the middle of summer. He shoves his hands in his pockets and walks a little faster.

By the time he wanders back Gansey and Blue have moved to the hood of the car, sitting pressed arm to arm.

Blue calls to him, "Enjoy your stargazing?"

Adam shrugs. He hadn't been looking at the stars. He hadn't been looking at anything, only walking. He didn't know how to interact with the world when he didn't have a purpose.

Or maybe he's just loopy from fatigue.

"It was all right," he says, coming to a stop on Gansey's side of the car. "Cold, though."

"You," Gansey says, "are a good guy, Adam Parrish."

"You," Adam says, "are easily impressed."

"Blue, tell Adam he's a good guy."

Blue eyes him like she has to take stock before she can answer. "He's not so bad."

"Thank you, Blue." Adam keeps his voice somber, but can't stop his eyes from crinkling, because Blue has very high standards.

She shakes her head at him and climbs back into the car.

Gansey rests his head against Adam's shoulder. "You deserve good things."

"I thought you weren't drinking tonight," which is the only answer he can give to empty sentimentality.

"I mean it," Gansey says. "You should be happy. You should have somebody who makes you happy."

Adam pats his hair. "You should be in bed already."

"What it is going to take," Gansey asks, with a voice that sends a shiver down Adam's back, "for you to believe in me?"

The audacity of that takes Adam's breath away. He has always believed in Gansey; anyone would, anyone could look at him and see how marvelous he is, all of the things he is going to accomplish, and it's a hell of a lot of nerve for him to be hurt because Adam doesn't openly acknowledge his greatness.

"I believe in you as much as I believe in anything."

Neither of them are happy with that response, but it's late, and the desert has no wisdom for them. It's just sand, empty sand and wind.

-

Work kicks up to an even more grueling pace, as though the firm is trying to get back whatever it spent on the fireworks party in sweat and tears. Adam walks in on one of the other junior associates crying in the supply closet one day; he leaves and shuts the door quietly behind him, pretends he didn't see anything. 

He can't stop himself from thinking, a little viciously, that she isn't going to make it in the long run. She won't, and he will. If he has a limit, he hasn't hit it yet.

The night he comes home from work and sees that the lights in Ronan's apartment are already off gives him some pause, though. That feels like something that ought to be spelled out in his contract; _employer shall not keep the employee working so late that employee's weird insomniac neighbor goes to sleep before him_.

He'd say that he starts checking Ronan's window every night at that point, except -- well, it had started before that, hadn't it.

Whenever it started, it becomes an iron-clad ritual the night that Ronan almost _burns the apartment building down_ , because how could Adam _not_ check every night so that _that_ doesn't happen again?

It goes something like this: Adam gets home and sees that there is a light on in Ronan's apartment. In retrospect, he's pretty sure that wasn't the fire, but he only throws a glance that way and congratulates himself sarcastically on his successful work/life balance as he kicks his shoes off and eats lukewarm McDonald's leaning against the wall of his living room, which is also his bedroom and his dining room, at ten o'clock at night.

And then he sees something flickering in the corner of his eye and he looks over again, annoyed, and there are _flames_ crawling up the wall of Ronan's apartment.

From now until he dies Adam will have to live with the knowledge that he'd be _useless_ in an emergency. His instincts don't kick in to tell him to call nine-one-one or go over to help. The first thought that flashes across his mind is that he hasn't worked on an arson case yet but that he'd offer his services to defend Ronan if it mean screwing over their landlord.

Ronan is more practical than Adam in a crisis, but only just; he throws a blanket on the fire and stomps at it until it goes out.

It is a _small_ fire, which could excuse the cavalier approach, except that it's a small _fire_ and fires _spread_. Adam doesn't own very many things in this life and every last one of them save his car is in the building that's attached to Ronan's apartment.

Adam puts his own tiny fire extinguisher on his window ledge, with a sign above it that reads $19.99 AT TARGET.

The next morning there's a sign in Ronan's window: KICKING SHIT = FREE.

-

Gansey keeps prodding at Adam, in the few-and-far-between moments of downtime they find together at the office. It's as though the night of the Fourth broke something open between them, and Gansey won't be happy until he can fill it with, God, _anything_ : he shares old family stories and follows it up with questions about Adam's family; comments on the latest alumni news from his alma mater and asks about Adam's school experiences; remembers funny Tinder misadventures and then reminds Adam that he should put himself out there more.

All of it is done in the most transparently casual terms. That might be the worst part, that Gansey believes he is capable of subtlety.

Adam spends a week dreaming of committing homicide, when he isn't researching and sitting in on conference calls and drafting motions in the defense of actual murderers, when he isn't consumed with guilt over his temper. He goes so far as to hide from Gansey in the supply closet one day -- the junior associate he'd seen in there crying gives him a disturbingly knowing look as he slinks back out -- and then one of the partner's golf buddies obligingly gets arrested in San Francisco with two prostitutes and enough cocaine to start his own banana republic. Gansey gets sent off to be feet on the ground in San Francisco on that case, and Adam gets a little breathing room.

"He's not trying to annoy you," Adam mutters, looking at the text Gansey had sent him: _I'm looking for places to row -- have you ever been? It's fantastic_.

But it only makes him feel more crazy, talking to himself.

He looks up through the window of his apartment. Ronan is sitting on the couch, staring at his laptop and wearing a pair of enormous headphones. It's disappointingly normal on an occasion when he could have used a distraction. Adam cannot count on anyone in his life.

 _Don't you have crew buddies? They'd probably know a good place,_ he sends back.

That nets him a run down of what every last member of the Yale men's crew is up to now, half a dozen thinly veiled questions about Adam's college friends, and then a screamingly hilarious drunken phone call from the bathroom of Gansey's comped hotel room where he tells Adam about their client's scorpion collection. Apparently Gansey _wasn't_ an arachnophobe before now but he's reconsidering that life choice with the help of the hotel's extremely well-stocked minibar.

It's good, to remember that Gansey does talk to him for reasons beyond prying into his personal business. But it's a frustration, too. If he was always so annoying, Adam could write him off. Instead, he goes through all the trouble of being _excited_ that Gansey is back in town in the beginning of August, and then when he isn't expecting it:

"You never said," Gansey says, pouring the first cup of coffee of the morning. He offers it to Adam, like he always does, and Adam rolls his eyes and shoves him out of the way and pours his own coffee. "What's your type?"

"Is that an astrology thing?" Adam asks. "I think it's Cancer."

"Oh, no, that's not what I meant." Gansey frowns. "Wait, when's your birthday? Did I miss your birthday?"

"What did you mean?" Adam asks, slurping loudly.

"I meant your type." Gansey passes him the milk out of the fridge. "You know, your dating type."

Adam chokes.

He plays it off like the coffee is too hot, which at least keeps Gansey from saying _it's a simple question._ It doesn't get Gansey to drop the subject.

Which is a shame. Because the honest truth is that Adam doesn't know his type. His entire dating history consists of the occasional hookup in college and the even more occasional hookup in law school. He never had the time to get to know someone just because they were _interesting_ ; he'd taken what he could get from people who weren't any more interested in him than he was in them.

But there's no good way to say that, no way to admit _I'm twenty-seven years old and I've never been on a date_. And even if there were, he's not going to admit it in the break room of a law firm he hates. He's not going to admit it to Gansey, who will file it away as an amusing anecdote about _a guy I used to work with_.

So he scrambles for the first thing he can think of, which is, unfortunately, "your girlfriend's pretty cute."

Gansey frowns, which sends a sharp spike of guilt through Adam. Gansey so rarely displays any kind of negative emotion. "That's not an appropriate way to talk about the interns." And after a heartbeat his face reddens and he tacks on, a little too loud, "and also she's not my girlfriend."

Adam rolls his eyes. "Right. You aren't keeping a countdown to the day the summer interns leave and you can ask Blue out without a hint of impropriety."

"I'm not," Gansey says, stiff. Adam hates that tone of voice on him; it makes him sound like a parody of all the worst things about rich guys, and Adam can almost forget, sometimes, that that's what Gansey _is_ , rich enough to be a joke. "A countdown would be gauche."

"Sure." Adam shuts the fridge harder than is necessary.

"Look, I think it would be good for you to get out about town more," Gansey says. "I understand if you don't like dating apps, but I could set you up with someone."

Adam cannot think of anything he wants less than for earnest, tone-deaf Gansey to set him up on a blind date.

"Thanks, but." He scrapes words out of his throat, pulling them up in the desperate hope that something will emerge that convinces Gansey to ditch this idea for good. "I'm...seeing someone."

Okay. That isn't what he expected. But maybe it will work.

Adam turns around.

It has not worked. It has only served to make Gansey immediately, terrifyingly invested in Adam's _non-existent love life._

"Parrish! Congratulations. What's her name?"

 _Fuck._ Of _fucking_ course there are follow up questions. Why couldn't Adam have thought of that ten seconds ago?

Is there anything that could make Gansey drop it?

Maybe -- if it's awkward enough, he'll let it go.

Adam blurts out, "Ronan."

"Oh." Gansey's eyes go wide in shock, and this is a thousand times worse than just saying _Jane_ or _Samantha_ or _Britney_. Adam realizes, too late to do any good, that should have told the truth. If he's going to find out that Gansey has a problem with Adam dating men, he'd rather come by that shitty piece of news honestly. "Sorry, I -- shouldn't have assumed."

"Don't worry about it," Adam mutters. At least he can trust that Gansey won't spread this around the office; that would be _gauche_.

But Gansey follows him out of the break room, and he manages to hide the weird look on his face. So, he wants to play nice: fine. That would be Gansey's style, wouldn't it; avoid the _appearance_ of intolerance at all costs. "So, how did you two meet?"

Adam regrets saying he hates dating apps. It would be so easy to throw out _Tinder._ Instead, he falls back on the trick of everyone who grew up telling a lot of lies: use the truth whenever you can.

"He lives in my building."

Gansey's quiet most of the way back to Adam's office, and just when Adam thinks he's won this depressing round of _stump the closet homophobe_ , Gansey asks, "You live on the westside, right? Nearby?"

"Palms."

Gansey steps in front of Adam and puts a hand on his chest to bar him from entering his office. "Are you dating _Ronan Lynch_?"

" _You know him?_ "

Adam _immediately_ realizes his mistake, realizes that he should have said _no_ , should have made up any other last name in the world. Ronan isn't a common name, but it wouldn't be impossible to believe in two Ronans living in the same neighborhood.

But he's too surprised by hatchet-wielding Ronan knowing New-Haven Gansey -- by hatchet-wielding Ronan knowing _anyone_ \-- by his own bad luck, though that last one shouldn't be a surprise anymore.

"He's my best friend," Gansey says, and Adam waits for this charade to blow up in his face, for Gansey to say _and he's not dating you_ , or _and he's engaged_ , or _and he's not into guys_ , or -- 

"And it's _just like him_ not to tell me about his new boyfriend." Gansey shakes his head and, to Adam's alarm, pulls his phone out of his pocket.

"You -- " Adam starts, and trails off, because _what the hell can he say_ right now?

Gansey laughs, "right," and puts his phone back in his pocket. "You know how Ronan is about his phone."

"Right," Adam lies, and hopes like hell it's _he doesn't own one_ instead of _he's glued to it constantly._

Gansey studies his face, visibly mulling over his words, and he settles on "How -- " when one of the senior associates walks by.

"There you are, Eli," because what's the point of having gone to Harvard if you can't be obnoxious about it. "I've got a question for you about the Jackson brief," and he pulls Gansey with him down the hallway.

Gansey shoots Adam one last look as he goes.

Adam heads right back to the break room and dumps his coffee down the sink. He's already wide awake.

-

Adam's nerves are frayed the entire morning, and it's only thanks to a lifetime's practice at compartmentalizing that he's able to get any work done. Even with that dubious advantage, he's biting his tongue every time someone walks past his office.

But Gansey doesn't come by and decry him as a liar or a stalker or a Peeping Tom, and the minutes crawl by, so Adam takes the unprecedented move of leaving the building at lunch.

He stops at the liquor store by the strip club, avoiding eye contact with the guys loitering outside because _who the hell loiters outside of a strip club in the middle of the day_.

He jogs up the stairs at the apartment. If he goes any slower he'll talk himself out of it.

 _He's probably not home._ Adam knocks, loudly. _You're wasting your time --_

Ronan opens the door.

He doesn't say anything. Which, fair; Adam knocked on his door looking like -- God, Adam can't imagine what he looks like; tailored suit, handle of vodka, wild look he knows he has in his eyes but can't do anything about.

"Hi," Adam says. "I need a favor, and it's going to sound really bad."

Ronan swings the door an inch closer to being shut. "I'm not a hitman."

Adam blinks. "Good for you?"

"And I don't beat people up."

"Well, thanks for making my favor seems small and normal in comparison." Adam holds up the bottle. It's very good vodka, the same that the name partners have in their liquor cabinets. "Can I come in?"

Ronan eyes the vodka. The door swings open by another half-an-inch. "You know it's noon, right."

"It's eleven o'clock."

Ronan looks over his shoulder and makes a face. "Fucking daylight savings time, why the fuck am I even awake."

"Daylight savings time started -- months ago." And that wouldn't explain his clock being _fast_ , what the hell.

"You suck at asking for favors," but that doesn't stop Ronan from swiping the vodka and stepping into the apartment, clearing the way for Adam.

Adam follows him in, debates leaving the door open behind him. He doesn't want to make Ronan feel trapped, since the conversation's bound to be uncomfortable enough. Though apparently Ronan doesn't beat people up, which is good to know.

Adam shuts the door, on the off-chance someone could walk by and overhear. There's no reason to risk anyone else witnessing his embarrassment.

"I told your friend Gansey we're dating," he says, because he figures he'll get it over with.

Ronan doesn't pause, unscrews the cap on the vodka and grabs a coffee mug from on top of his mini-fridge. "What, you got sick of him bitching at you about your anti-social tendencies?"

"I -- kind of?"

"Explain," Ronan says. "You woke me up, you might as well be entertaining."

"Right, sorry if I'm not making my personal disasters interesting enough."

"You're not." Ronan takes a sip of vodka. "Do you have a musical number, or some trained animals, or is it just a sad weird guy with booze?"

"I could take the booze back," Adam says.

Ronan curls a hand protectively around the bottle.

"Right. I -- work at the same law firm as Gansey."

"Scumbag, Scumbag, and Creep?" Ronan asks.

Adam starts, because it drives it home all over again for him: Ronan knows the derogatory nickname for the firm, because he's _Gansey's best friend_ , and fuck, Adam is so screwed.

"Right," Adam mutters. "Well, I -- got tired of Gansey bugging me about my love life, so I thought I'd tell him I was dating someone. I didn't figure that he would _know you_."

"Why didn't you just tell him to fuck off?" Ronan asks.

"I was trying to be polite!"

"Lying is polite?"

"It's at least as polite as interrogating someone."

Ronan shrugs as though to say, _point_.

Adam breathes in deeply. He can't take stock of how Ronan is handling this -- if Ronan is processing it at all, given that he's just woken up and has had an unknown amount of vodka on an empty stomach. It certainly isn't going as badly as Adam had feared, but it isn't -- well, he hadn't been able to imagine any best case scenarios, but he doubts they'd look like this.

He tries for an honest, straightforward approach, since a lack of the same is what landed him here in the first place. 

"Can you just -- be cool about this?"

Ronan looks at him intently before fishing a second coffee mug out of the sink and rinsing it out. "I'm not going to lie to Gansey for you." He pours a generous shot of vodka into the mug and holds it out toward Adam.

Adam sighs. "Great." He's tempted, but he doesn't let himself to take it. As consolation prizes go, it's not _bad_ , but if Ronan really wanted to be helpful he could send a couple less than truthful texts and then pretend to break up with Adam. It wouldn't be that hard.

"Take it," Ronan says.

"Again, it's eleven o'clock in the morning."

" _Take it_ ," Ronan says, swishing the mug until a little vodka spills on the cheap linoleum. "Drinks, first date."

Adam gapes. "What?"

"First date, we have drinks. That's traditional." Ronan finishes his own drink, and Adam takes the second cup from him, lifts it to his lips, mimicking Ronan's gesture on autopilot.

The vodka _does_ go down smooth. It ought to; it cost enough.

Ronan looks at the clock on the microwave, which reads _eight forty-five_ , and how is _Adam_ the confused one here.

"Okay," he says. "Second date, brunch. Let's go. You're buying."

Adam is not clear why going on fake-dates with someone is less of a lie than just claiming to go on dates with them. But Ronan's the one doing him the favor. If he wants to define the terms, that's his right.

Except for one thing.

"I paid for drinks," Adam points out.

Ronan smirks. "Yeah, but I'm a delicate flower and you're trying to woo me."

"I thought we were going for truthful."

"Are you saying I'm not a beautiful goddamn flower?" Ronan drawls, and apparently he's a _complete shitface_ , which Adam should have guessed a long time ago, say when Ronan had a hatchet sent to him in the US mail, or fed a hamburger to a goat, or almost _burned down their multi-residence building_.

"I would never say such a thing," Adam deadpans, "you're so fragrant and responsive to sunlight."

Ronan snorts and pushes him out of the apartment, and before Adam knows it he's at the nauseatingly hipster brunch place down the street that he's never stepped in before (he has enough ennui, thanks).

"Yeah, it's disgusting," Ronan says in response to Adam's judgmental expression. He picks up the _gluten-free offerings_ insert of the menu and sets it as far away as possible -- on the next table, to be exact, crumpled up and sticking out of a vase of flowers. "But they do bottomless mimosas."

"Right." Adam mimics Ronan's dismissive tone. "What you really need after a breakfast of vodka is to wash it down with a bottle of champagne."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "Or you could get a Bloody Mary, I don't care."

Adam thinks about the fact that he has to go back to work after this. Then he thinks about the fact that he has to go back to work _with Gansey_ after this.

"Two Bloody Marys and the mimosa brunch," he tells the waitress.

He braces himself for further interrogation or mockery as soon as the waitress is gone, and instead -- well, okay, Ronan interrogates and mocks him, but _not_ about lying to Gansey about his relationship status, not even about his job.

Instead:

"When are you going to get your fucking Mustang fixed?"

Adam gapes at him. It feels like he's done an unfair amount of gaping at Ronan, except that that's probably the reaction Ronan gets from everyone and thus doesn't count.

"Excuse you, my Mustang is _fine_ \-- "

"Fuck you," Ronan says, and it's like a normal person saying, _well, I don't know about that,_ "she needs a tune up and you've let her get dinged to hell -- "

"I tune her up myself, and excuse the hell out of me if she's got a couple of scratches, she's fifty years old -- "

They're halfway through bacon and French toast and -- okay, bottomless mimosas by definition can't be divided in half, but they're well past halfway through as much champagne as Adam _should_ be having during his lunch break on a work day -- by the time it occurs to him to ask how Ronan knows about his beleaguered Mustang, who really does need some work, not that he's going to admit as much to Ronan. He takes care of her as best he can.

"We're _neighbors_ ," Ronan says, like Adam asked where the sun goes at night. "I notice the guy who has a car that's way too good for him."

"Yeah, okay," Adam says, easy, because he can't meaningfully protest Ronan paying attention to his neighbors. Adam doing that same thing is what landed them in this mess of -- Bloody Marys and scrambled eggs and _exquisite_ bacon.

"Shit, this food is good," Adam says.

"I know," Ronan says, "too bad they're all bleeding heart assholes," and Adam must be drunk, because he laughs at that.

Despite all his worries, Ronan doesn't say a word about Gansey. Adam is the one who brings him back up, and only then after he has to put his credit card down on the tab (alone; Ronan apparently meant what he meant about Adam paying, and from the stone cold look on his face Adam would guess that Ronan _always_ means what he says). _Money_ makes him think of _work_ makes him think of _responsibility_ makes him think of _oh, shit, Gansey_.

"So how do you know Gansey?" he asks, aiming for casual.

From the look Ronan gives him, he misses casual and lands right in the midst of _neurotic_. But that doesn't stop Ronan from humoring him. Adam is left to debate the same question he's answered with _yes_ a million times, is charity worse than deprivation.

"We went to school together."

"Yale?" and Adam isn't able to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

Ronan pulls an offended face, but it's so clearly fake that it's all Adam can do not to laugh. "You don't think I'm smart enough for Yale? Are you only dating me for my body?"

"I'm dating you for your connections," and it ought to be too early to joke about this, but Ronan grins.

"Boarding school," he clarifies.

" _God_ ," Adam says without thinking. "That sounds awful."

Ronan stares down at the table. "It sucked," he says, and then Adam's check arrives, and right, it's a weekday and Adam was supposed to be back at work ages ago. He makes excuses that are not very appeasing to his own ears and leaves Ronan at the table with the last of the champagne.

-

Adam gets home at the positively decadent hour of eight p.m. and does his now-routine check of Ronan's window. Lights: on, not that he'd expected otherwise this early in the day. Weirdness quotient: low; Ronan is sitting on the couch wearing his massive headphones. On fire: not at the moment. Really, it could be a normal person's normal home, except that the raven is sitting in the window and caws when Adam looks over.

Which makes Ronan look up, which means Ronan sees Adam looking at him, and thanks a lot, raven. Adam was doing a good enough job embarrassing himself without avian intervention.

Ronan jerks his head. The raven caws again.

Adam looks around his own apartment. It's nearly identical to how it looked when he moved in. He hadn't seen the point in decorating; the biggest impact he's had is filling the mini-fridge with pre-made meals and covering the table with paperwork.

He sets down his suit jacket and stack of case law and leaves.

Ronan's door is unlocked; Adam hangs out in the doorway before he enters. There's an elephant in the room, and given that this whole circus is his fault, it's on him to address it.

"Third date is Netflix and chill?" he asks, dubious.

Ronan rolls his eyes. "I don't put out that easy."

Adam laughs, "okay, good." He feels like an idiot for saying it, even more of an idiot for the fact that it needed to be said, but he also feels a little better, knowing that Ronan's on the same page and doesn't have to worry that Adam's going to try anything.

Ronan had shut his laptop and removed his headphones while Adam was heading over, but there's a movie playing on the television. It's not in English or in any language Adam can identify, and there are no subtitles. Ronan either speaks the language or isn't that invested in the movie; he turns his back to the screen to take a Tupperware out of the microwave.

"Here." He shoves it at Adam.

Adam is getting tired of Ronan surprising him, so he doesn't say _what is this_ or _why are you feeding me_ or _I ate already_.

Besides, his dinner had been half a bagel left over from someone's morning meeting, and whatever the hell this is -- some kind of casserole? -- smells really good.

"There's no way you made this in your shitty kitchenette." Adam has doubts that Ronan could cook anything at all, but he's not in a position to judge.

"It's leftovers," Ronan says, vague and unhelpful and enjoying being vague and unhelpful.

He sits back on the couch and Adam sits on the other end, though not before leaning forward and stealing the fork out of the Tupperware that's in front of Ronan.

Ronan glares at him and scoops up casserole with his fingers. Ew. Adam wonders if Ronan doesn't just get another fork because that would be surrendering or because he only owns one fork.

"How did I not immediately see that you were a delicate flower." Adam takes a bite. It's _amazing_.

Ronan licks his fingers clean, which is -- distracting. And unhygienic. Adam focuses back on his own food. "How many dates did you say we'd been on?"

"I just said I was seeing someone." It comes out snippy. "I didn't give an exact breakdown."

"Excuse me for not knowing how to lie about a relationship."

"You've got as much of an idea as I do."

"Christ, you're a mess," Ronan says, scooping up more casserole with his fingers.

"You set your apartment on fire," Adam retorts, because while 'thinks that casserole is a finger food' is a pretty good new exhibit for _Lynch v. Normalcy_ , it doesn't trump arson.

"Yeah." Ronan is utterly unashamed. "So when I say you're a mess, I know what I'm talking about."

Adam gestures at the scorch marks on Ronan's wall, pointing with the tines of his stolen fork right under Ronan's nose, because Adam is a bit of a jackass sometimes. "The landlord's not going to give you your deposit back."

"The landlord can blow me."

"Oh, him you'll put out for?"

Ronan flips him off. There's tomato sauce under his fingernail.

"It wouldn't be that hard to fix," Adam says, because now that he's got the inside view of the damage it isn't that bad. He'd miraculously avoided any damage to the carpet. "You could cover it up with a new coat of paint."

"Or you could learn to appreciate my interior decorating."

"Or you could not let a stingy bastard wring hundreds of dollars out of you. There's a principle involved." Adam rarely does anything because of _principle_ , but apparently Ronan does, because he makes a thoughtful noise, and his eyes keep darting over to the burnt paint as Adam attempts to make any sense of out of the (Polish? Czech? Russian? It's very drab and everyone is white and depressed) movie playing on the television, and somehow Adam ends up dragging Ronan through the aisles at Home Depot first thing the next morning, despite Ronan's complaints about waking up early on a Saturday.

He'd suspect Ronan of sleepwalking, except that every time he turns away a new useless item appears in the cart: sprinkler heads, a ten-foot-long curtain pole, a tube of caulk. ("You don't want my caulk?" "Yeah, I'm not doing this with you.")

Ronan comes to life when they arrive at the paint section, mostly to bring Adam chips for every color in the world other than the one they're looking for: sugar poppy, Malaysian mist, foxglove, something called _flirt alert_.

Adam glares at him and goes right back to comparing _frost_ and _silky white_ to the scrap of paint he'd liberated from Ronan's wall. "Now I _know_ you're trolling me."

"I'm not trolling," Ronan lies, and comes back a minute later with a sample called fuzzy duckling. Adam should have expected that his response to accusations of trolling would be to troll harder.

"No."

"It's cheerful and shit," Ronan insists.

"It doesn't match your other walls."

"Maybe I want an accent wall."

The thought of Ronan having a _fuzzy duckling accent wall_ is so delightful that Adam has to fight like hell not to smile.

"I wouldn't be a very supportive boyfriend if I crushed your dreams." He puts back his collection of boring off-white paint chips. "By all means."

Ronan doesn't back down at his bluff getting called, which means Adam isn't able to say _seriously, though, let's get the real paint_. He settles for tucking the paint sample into his wallet while Ronan pays for his hideous orange abomination, because maybe someday Ronan will come to his senses.

...No. What is Adam thinking? Ronan is never going to back down. But at some point Adam might get sick of looking through his window and seeing a fuzzy duckling eyesore. He could break into Ronan's apartment and repaint it while he's out and then gaslight Ronan by pretending it had never been pastel orange.

Ronan opens the paint can as soon as they're back in his apartment. Adam confiscates it.

"If you were going to half-ass this you should have told me before you spent money on it."

"It's just money," Ronan says, which provokes an enormous cognitive dissonance as Adam is forced to remember, _right_ : boarding school. Gansey's best friend. Current circumstances aside, Ronan must have grown up loaded.

"Congratulations on being either obscenely wealthy or totally clueless."

"Why can't I be both?"

"You can be whatever you want to be as long as you help me move the couch," and it's the couch, and then the bed, and then the dresser which _why does Ronan even own a dresser when all of his clothes are on the ground_ , and then all of the clothes on the ground and every other piece of junk in the room. Ronan owns way too much crap.

By the time Ronan's way-too-much-crap is all pushed up against the opposite wall, Ronan has gone from rolling his eyes every time Adam tells him to do something, to very sarcastically doing exactly what Adam says in exactly the way Adam says to.

As far as mocking goes, Adam can tolerate _being listened to_ just fine.

Ronan catches on eventually that Adam is making him do the majority of the work, but by then they've got the space around the wall cleared and a drop cloth over the floor and painters tape around all the edges, so Adam's feeling pretty smug.

"Who died and made you king of the painters," Ronan mutters, pouring a glass of water.

He doesn't offer one to Adam, so Adam feels no compunction about taking it out of his hand and drinking from it.

"Three summers spent painting houses," he tells Ronan. "You should open the window or you'll get brain damage."

"Maybe I _want_ brain damage."

"I was going off the assumption that you had some already. I should have said _more_ brain damage." Ronan shows no sign of going to open the window, so Adam spitefully drains the last of the water and opens it himself.

The raven lands on the window sill and tilts its head at Adam: _you're not my Disney princess._

"Out," Ronan says, stepping up to the window and waving a hand at the bird. It hops a few inches to the side. "Fuck off."

"Maybe it's hungry?"

"She can get her own food." Ronan's tone is completely at odds with the gentle way that he holds out a hand for the bird to hop onto. He lifts her up to eye level and strokes her feathers. "She's just here 'cause she's an attention whore."

Adam lifts a hand up, hesitates, and then runs a finger as lightly as possible along the raven's back.

She squawks at him, flapping both wings. He snatches his hand away, takes a step back in chagrin.

The raven caws at Ronan, a final complaint at her treatment, and flies out the window.

Adam can feel his face burning. Which is a complete overreaction. This is such a tiny stupid mistake, it shouldn't in a thousand years bother him --

"Can we paint now or what?" Ronan asks, and Adam has to process that to realize that Ronan isn't pissed about the bird or making fun of him.

"No, Jesus, you're impatient." His face is still burning, but his voice comes out calm. He gets Ronan back on track scraping the burnt paint off the wall.

They've finished that and are halfway through the primer coat when Ronan says, "You're a lawyer."

"Yup." 

There's more than that, but Ronan takes his time. Adam focuses on painting, applying even pressure while he pushes the roller up over his head. It's been ages since he worked with his hands. He hasn't even worked on the Mustang, not since he moved. He should do something about that.

"Lawyers don't paint houses."

"I wasn't born with a degree."

"Or live in shithole apartments."

Adam snorts. "Spoken like someone who doesn't know the job prospects of recent law school graduates."

"I know the kind of money Gansey pulls," Ronan says. "You could afford better."

Adam hadn't had first/last/deposit saved up when he moved to LA. By the end of the summer he'll have more than enough and he'll be able to move. For the first time in his life he'll live somewhere that he isn't ashamed to call home.

"I could," Adam says. "But I like the view here."

Ronan flicks his paintbrush, speckling Adam with grey primer.

Adam points threateningly. "I am _not_ going to help you re-carpet."

They go out for lunch while the primer dries. Adam learns that Ronan's affection does not apply to all or even most birds, that he'll eat anything if it's smothered in hot sauce, and that he either has a death wish or honestly believes he's immortal, because he doesn't look either way before jaywalking across a busy six lane highway.

Adam almost makes Ronan buy his burrito, as payback for giving him a heart attack, but he doesn't know what Ronan's finances are like. Even if he did grow up rich, that doesn't mean he has money now. And Adam doesn't like either of those scenarios, taking advantage of the eccentric and wealthy or extorting the weird and poor. He buys his own lunch; it's easier that way.

 _Fuzzy duckling_ turns out to be even uglier than Adam was expecting, when he's staring at yards and yards of it.

Ronan studies the wall once they're done with the first coat of paint.

"Fuck, it needs another coat, doesn't it."

"Yeah. Got to let it dry first, though."

Ronan scrubs at his face, leaves a streak of fuzzy duckling orange on his nose. "I'm going to take a nap."

"You shouldn't," Adam says. "Paint fumes."

Ronan scowls at his bed, which is under a foot of detritus anyway. "Your place doesn't have any fumes."

"No," Adam says, horribly amused, "that's how I prefer my living spaces."

Ronan turns the scowl on him. Adam thinks maybe he's been immunized to that expression by now.

"Do you want to come nap at my place?" he asks as obnoxiously as he can, because apparently Ronan isn't just going to beg a favor off of him, he's going to force Adam to offer it to him.

"I guess I wouldn't die."

"You wouldn't, because again, no paint fumes."

Adam makes Ronan wash off the worst of the paint in his sink and puts the spare sheet down on top of the bed before he lets Ronan get on it. ("Way to make me feel like a welcome guest and not a stray dog." "I saw you climb into a dumpster last week, you're worse than a stray dog." "Just for that I'm going to give you fleas.")

Adam settles down at his tiny dining table and manages to read through a dozen jury verdicts before his phone chirps at him.

He scrambles to silence it, shooting a glance toward his bed. No sign that the noise disturbed Ronan's sleep.

It's a text from Gansey: _Oh God, why am I so sunburned?_

_I'm going to hazard a guess that you went out in the sun_

_I was in the shade the whole time_

_Were you by the water?_

_...this is why I need you around, Parrish_  
_No one else is so practical and at the same time so dismissive_

Adam snorts. At least, if he is a member of Gansey's collection, he's a valued member. _Drink some water_

That's not bad advice. Adam has been sitting in one position too long; he stretches and forces himself to get a glass of water, even though he isn't thirsty.

 _I shall, and then I shall drink some sangria_  
_There's this great taco shop by the beach I'm going to hit up_  
_You want to join?_

 _Can't_ , Adam texts back, and looks up again to check that he isn't disturbing Ronan. Still asleep. Some spike of amusement or fondness runs through Adam, so he elaborates, _Plans with Ronan_.

He gets a second glass of water and leaves it on the upside-down crate by the bed that is his minimalist nightstand. Ronan said he isn't a good host, but Adam will show him; Adam will be a fantastic host, much better than Ronan is, and then he will _rub it in Ronan's face_.

 _Bring Ronan with you! I haven't seen him in ages_  
_Honestly it's been days. DAYS, PARRISH._

Adam tries to imagine a relationship where not seeing the other person for days felt like _ages_. How can Gansey keep track of the individual people he socializes with? It's not as though he's ever alone for long.

Though he did say Ronan is his _best_ friend. And it would be pretty hard to lose track of him. Adam would notice, if he went a few days without seeing Ronan do something dangerous or inexplicable.

 _Sorry, working on a home improvement project_ , Adam sends, and then buries his cell phone in the latest appellate rulings. He shuts out Gansey, shuts out the sleeping body across the room from him, shuts out fuzzy ducklings and offended ravens, and focuses on his work. He's always been good at that.

When he looks up again, it is much later, and Ronan is sitting up on the bed.

He almost asks _what_ , because Ronan -- is _looking_ at him, has been looking at him for who knows how long, with that intense expression in his eyes, and Adam can't believe that he couldn't tell, couldn't feel it, didn't sink under the weight of Ronan's scrutiny.

He thinks if he asks _what_ , that Ronan would tell him.

Except that Ronan just woke up, and Adam is just bleary from reading the fine print on the dark side of humanity, and there is no _what_.

"Sleep okay?" he asks instead, because he has to out-host Ronan. Not like that's hard, but he has to make a point of it.

"Your mattress sucks."

Adam shrugs. The landlord had thrown in the furniture the last tenant had left behind for a few extra bucks, and the mattress must have seen untold years and unknown horrors, but Adam tries very hard not to think about that.

Ronan swings his legs off the bed and stumbles into the living room side of the room. "Wow, way to make a mess."

"I do what I can." Adam has become surrounded by paper over the last few hours: notepads, published cases, jury verdicts, legal journals, stacked on top of each other in a system that makes sense to Adam but not, granted, to anyone else. Most of them are covered with notes which, again, make sense to Adam.

"Is this in _code_?" Ronan asks, picking up a legal pad and peering at Adam's terrible handwriting.

"Shorthand," Adam lies, and grabs the pad back. Ronan smirks at him to let him know he remains unconvinced. "And _don't_ tear this paper up, I need it."

"I'm done with that."

"What was all that about, anyway?" Adam asks.

Ronan's eyes go shifty, and holy shit, there's something in this world that he's embarrassed of? Adam can hardly believe it. And he doesn't want to pry, he really doesn't, because he doesn't want to be that guy and also because he owes Ronan an enormous debt at this point.

He settles for leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hand and looking _rapt_.

Ronan makes a disgusted noise and chugs his whole glass of water. But Adam's not hurting for patience, and when Ronan looks back at him he's still in the same pose.

He sighs. "I was making my own paper."

"What?" Adam wasn't expecting that. "Why?"

"It's called _recycling_ , Parrish, it's good for the environment."

"Uh-huh," Adam says, unconvinced. "You know you can just dump your recyclables in the blue bin, right, save a lot of work."

"Pretty fucking lazy for a guy who just made me repaint my apartment."

"Pretty industrious for a guy who just took a three hour nap. What do you do with homemade paper?"

There's that shifty look again.

This time Adam only has to raise an eyebrow.

Ronan mutters, "I made a notebook for Gansey."

"Oh my God," Adam says, "you're a _nerd_."

Ronan glares at him. "Gansey's the one who gets off on fucking handcrafted writing materials, not me."

"Yeah, but who's the bigger nerd, the nerd or the nerd who enables him?"

"Gansey," Ronan insists. "Gansey is always the biggest nerd."

"Fine." Adam stands up, stretches out the cricks in his joints. "Pretend you don't stay up all night making thoughtful homemade gifts for your friends. I'll still know the truth."

"I should set your apartment on fire," Ronan mutters.

Adam shrugs, "I could use an accent wall," and lets Ronan's resulting glare nudge him outside.

The second coat goes on faster than the first; Adam's gotten back in the hang of it, and Ronan spends less time deliberately getting in his way. Probably he's tired of painting. Or, Christ, tired of Adam, because it's six o'clock and they've spent the _entire day_ together. He'd be sick of himself, if he were in Ronan's place. He ought to be sick of Ronan, because he's been with him all day and frankly he doesn't like anyone that much, and his arms and back are tired and he didn't get half as much work done as he meant to, and Ronan never said _thank you_ and never will.

Still, when they finish up, Ronan's new accent wall evenly coated and the rest of the room looking like a black hole tried to suck it up, Adam hears the words, "grab something to eat?" fall out of his mouth.

Ronan says, "I gotta drive out to Pasadena."

Right. Ronan has plans. At the very least he's got to find somewhere to spend the night. He can't sleep in his place with the paint fumes and inaccessible bed. And he can't sleep in Adam's bed while Adam is in it.

"What's in Pasadena?"

Ronan's a step behind him on the stairs, so Adam doesn't get to see his face. His voice sounds funny when he says, "My mom."

"Your mom?" Adam asked, trying not to sound surprised. _Parents_ ought to be a separate concept from _Ronan_. If he had parents, then once upon a time he was a child, and that's both a hilarious and terrifying thought.

"Yup."

Ronan heads for the sidewalk, and this is where Adam would turn to approach his own stairs, and he's going to let Ronan go, ought to let Ronan go.

Except Ronan adds, more careful with his words than Adam has yet heard from him, "she bought a ranch out there a few years back."

Adam falls into step next to Ronan, studying his expression from the corner of his eye. There's something clouding his face that's a bit like anger and a bit like sorrow, and while Adam can't make heads or tails of it he knows that there's more to the story than that.

But he also knows about secrets, and walls, and the desperate need to defend against being seen, and he thinks that this isn't an invitation. It doesn't need to be. Ronan could have left it at 'yup', could have avoided Adam's question entirely.

Sometimes, being told that there is a story is a big enough admission in itself.

So Adam just says, as faux-casual as Ronan, "Is that where you got the goat?"

Ronan's shoulders relax a fraction of an inch. "It's not like I keep goats in my apartment."

"No, your place is more suited for pigs, isn't it?"

"It was fine until someone made me move everything around."

"Right, it would have been so much better with wet paint flung all over everything." He realizes at this point he's followed Ronan further than he meant to go, all the way down the block. Debates internally whether it's more awkward to keep following Ronan or to turn back to the apartment and call attention to the situation.

He decides to keep walking. If nothing else, he needs to get dinner.

They hit the main drag and Adam starts to turn right to head for the grocery store, but Ronan nudges him left with his shoulder.

Adam blinks at him, but Ronan has already passed, heading for the McDonald's on the corner.

Adam follows him.

Ronan doesn't head for the restaurant, though; he heads for the corner of the parking lot, pulls out his keys and unlocks a sleek grey BMW. One more point of evidence for Ronan being _secretly wealthy_ , though he has some nerve giving Adam crap about his living situation if he really is rich. Not that Ronan is lacking in nerve.

In any case, Adam thinks that the bizarre, ever-changing puzzle that is Ronan has gained several pieces today, if not entire new dimensions.

"You left your car here all day?"

"Yeah. So?"

"You're going to get towed."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "I park here all the time."

"You're going to get towed _all the time_."

"No one notices crap like that." Ronan swings the driver's door open. "Ride?"

 _To Pasadena?_ No, Ronan must have meant back to the apartment building. Which is -- thoughtful. But it's only a block.

"No," Adam says, "I need to swing by the grocery store."

Ronan nods at him and gets in the car without another word.

Adam watches him drive off before walking in the opposite direction to find dinner.

He has a moment when he goes to bed that night where he thinks, _Ronan was here_ , but he only has a memory to show for it. If there was any residual scent on the pillows it's lost to shampoo and time.

Adam rolls over and wills himself asleep.

-

Gansey pokes his sunburned nose into Adam's office while Adam is fighting with his computer; the computer has decided it doesn't need to turn on. Adam disagrees.

"Morning." Gansey yawns in the middle of the word, because if Gansey could be awake and alert on a Monday morning he would be too perfect to live and someone would have sacrificed him to a vengeful god by now. "How's Ronan?"

"Belligerent and confounding," Adam says without thinking, and kicks himself a moment later. "Uh -- "

"Don't worry," Gansey says, amused, "I'm used to translating." The expression on his face is so fond that Adam would be worried, if he hadn't seen how Gansey lights up around Blue. And if he and Ronan were actually dating, which they aren't.

"I don't even want to know what Ronan says about me," Adam mutters.

"Probably not, no." Which means that Ronan has communicated with Gansey about their supposed relationship. Which was the point, but it still makes Adam feel small and shameful. "I missed you two the other night. I haven't gotten to see Ronan in a while -- you know how unpredictable his work schedule is."

"Right." He'd assumed Ronan didn't have a job, but he can't ask Gansey what his not-boyfriend does for a living. "Maybe next time," and then his computer starts beeping at him obnoxiously, and that's enough to get Gansey to leave him alone.

It sits in the back of his mind as he calls IT to handle his computer, and as he reads through hundreds of pages of materials he gets other people to print for him, and as he hides from Blue before she can see how much printer paper he's gone through. There must be some profession that requires swearing, glaring, and generally being a dick, but Ronan already said that he isn't a hitman or hired muscle, and Adam can't think what that leaves. He drinks enough to be a bartender, and that would give him a work schedule that isn't compatible with Gansey's, but then Adam tries to wrap his mind around the idea of Ronan chatting people up for tips and the whole thing falls apart.

He's still thinking about it when he stops for takeout on the way home, and maybe that's why he buys way too much food. It certainly wasn't intentional, but all the same he gets back to his apartment and realizes that he's easily got enough for two people.

He looks up and spots Ronan across the way, wearing a pair of enormous headphones and playing video games or watching porn or whatever it is he does on his laptop when he isn't confounding the expectations of normal people.

Ronan looks up just then, and it's the easiest thing in the world for Adam to lift up the food so he can see it, tilt his head in a question. He hasn't locked the door yet; it's only a minute and then Ronan's inside his apartment.

"You survived Pasadena."

"I went to visit my mother, not to fight in a war." Ronan lifts up the carton of orange chicken and sniffs at it. "What did you think was going to happen?"

"I don't know, you could get eaten by a goat." Adam pulls the chicken away from Ronan and sticks a plate in his hand instead.

Ronan rolls his eyes. "You're just going to have to wash this," he says, and, "A goat wouldn't eat a person."

"They're my dishes, let me worry about them. Since I no longer have to worry about goats eating me, apparently."

"Pigs are omnivores," Ronan says, cheerful in a way that Adam doesn't trust at all. "They would eat a human if they got a chance."

"Exactly how many human corpses have you fed to pigs?"

"I told you," Ronan protests, "I'm not a hitman," and right, this is the perfect chance to ask Ronan about what his job is; but then he says, with an innocence that Adam doesn't trust anymore than his cheer, "You know, I'm thinking about putting a skylight in my apartment."

"You definitely won't get your security deposit back if you _punch a hole through your roof_."

"You can't put a price on natural sunlight," Ronan says.

"Yes, you can," Adam argues, "and it's less than your security deposit."

"Increased sun exposure helps with seasonal affective disorder."

"It's August."

"I'm planning ahead."

"You deserve to be miserable," Adam tells him, and he doesn't get a chance to think what an inappropriate thing that is to say to someone before Ronan smiles wickedly and flings a piece of chicken at his face. They start hurling more and more offensive curses at each other -- though Adam does not retaliate on the food-throwing since this is _his apartment_ and he'd have to clean it up. He completely forgets to ask about Ronan's job somewhere around the point that Ronan says he hopes Adam breaks his leg on a mountain trail and dies of dysentery, because seriously, _what the fuck_.

-

Ronan's window is dark the next night, and the night after that, and Adam's not coming home from work so late that he thinks Ronan is asleep. If nothing else, the raven is sitting on the railing outside the window, looking even more forlorn than she already does on account of being a raven. Adam assumes that Ronan has to be out, for his bird to be waiting so sadly outside.

It's only on Friday, when he comes home and sees the raven outside the dark window for the fourth night in a row, that it occurs to Adam that Ronan might have _gone out_. That Ronan could be sleeping somewhere else, somewhere that isn't his mother's ranch in Pasadena.

The idea occurs to him, but he promptly dismisses it. He and Ronan aren't dating, but he knows, on some level that he couldn't explain to anyone, that Ronan would consider it cheating, to go out and sleep with someone else while he's pretending to be Adam's boyfriend. And he knows just as strongly, without being told, that Ronan would die before he'd cheat on someone.

So Adam goes and gets a slice of bread and tosses it outside Ronan's door for his raven -- she watches him suspiciously and croaks at him until he leaves -- and only worries that Ronan has passed out in a ditch or forgotten where he lives or died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail.

-

Ronan comes home that Saturday at eight o'clock in the morning. Adam hadn't realized that Ronan knew eight o'clock in the morning existed.

Adam has already run to 7-Eleven for his morning coffee and skimmed a half-dozen witness statements and timed his first mail check of the day to coincide with his downstairs neighbor taking her illicit puppy out to use the courtyard. When he looks up from petting little Secret Spot he sees Ronan glaring at the stairs up to his door like they have personally offended him.

A week ago Adam would taken have stock of Ronan's condition and felt judgmental and superior and then moved on with his life.

Today he walks over. "You look like shit."

Ronan scowls at him. "You know, you could _try_ sweet talking me."

"I'm saving that for our anniversary," Adam says. "Where have you been?"

"Film set."

Adam has lived in LA long enough to know that not every barista has a screenplay and a sizzle reel, but a lot of them do. Still, he hadn't suspected it from Ronan.

"What were you filming?"

"Gay porn."

Ronan is so obviously expecting a scandalized reaction that Adam can't give it to him. "As long as you used protection."

"Asshole," Ronan says, throwing an arm around Adam's shoulders. "Come on, I'll show you."

They get up to Ronan's apartment and he sets down his messenger bag, pulls an enormous hard drive out of it. It only takes him a moment to get the hard drive hooked up to his laptop and to navigate through a half-dozen nested folders with incomprehensible names; everything he's doing is familiar to him.

He double-clicks on a file and a movie starts playing.

For a second, when an attractive woman in an too-small top shows up in soft focus, Adam thinks that Ronan actually _is_ going to show him a porno he just shot. Instead, the woman starts monologuing about her difficult relationship with her mother. And then the file ends and the next file autoplays, and it's the same monologue. The same astoundingly, impossibly terrible monologue.

"God," Adam says, "I wish this _was_ porn."

"No kidding."

He eyes Ronan skeptically. "You're not _in_ this, are you? I don't have to pretend to be amazed at your performance?"

Ronan points at the top of the screen, where a black object can just be seen hanging over the actress's head. "Fucking camera guy screwed his frame."

Adam has to squint to figure it out. His own ambitions have always been more pragmatic than Hollywood. "Microphone?"

"Boom mic," Ronan says, and adds off-handedly, "and I do general sound design."

"Does that mean you're going to dub over these actors with believable dialogue?"

"Don't care enough to bother." He exits out of the video. "I gotta do some post-production on another movie."

"Is it any better than this one?"

"It's even worse."

"Cool," Adam says, and that's clearly his cue to leave, but something possesses him to add, "I'll get coffee, don't start without me."

"Get me a donut, too."

"You're so high maintenance," Adam calls over his shoulder as he leaves, but he gets a couple of donuts and grabs a bunch of sugar packets and half-and-half. He doesn't know how Ronan takes his coffee and he doesn't trust any dairy products that he'd find in Ronan's fridge.

The guy at the 7-Eleven is surprised to see him back so soon. Adam decides if he can't curb his caffeine addiction he needs to at least start going further afield for his weekend fix, because being greeted _by name_ at 7-Eleven is fucking embarrassing.

The new movie is worse than the first one, but it's also edited down to a rough cut, so Adam only has to listen to each wooden line delivery _once_.

He gives up paying any attention to the screen pretty early on; Ronan had started the movie somewhere in the middle and the plot is nonexistent as far as Adam can tell. He watches Ronan instead, the way that Ronan stares intently at the screen, jotting things down and pausing frequently to note the timecode.

After an interminable second act he kicks Adam out -- "I need to piss and sleep and get real work done and you're getting in the way of two of those things" (Adam does not ask which two) -- and Adam changes and goes for a run. He has too much energy, shouldn't have had a second giant coffee, but it's hard to make himself regret it now.

-

"If I don't get out of here in the next thirty seconds I'm going to murder someone."

"As your lawyer, I advise you not to announce your murders ahead of time." Adam glances up, less worried than he is bemused that he's acquired more than one person who makes such matter-of-fact threats. It's a weird type to have. He wonders what it is about him that brought both Ronan and Blue into his life.

Blue is playing with one of her hair clips. That's a good sign. If she was really about to snap she wouldn't waste time with her hair.

Or maybe she knows how to kill someone with a barrette.

"Are you saying I couldn't represent myself in court?"

"I'm saying you're not stupid enough to try."

"Have you ever given anyone a compliment that wasn't buried in riddles and nastiness?"

Adam thinks. "Do insincere compliments count?"

"No."

"Then, no." He glances at his watch, a parting gift from his undergrad internship. It's ugly, but it was decently expensive and he thinks it makes him look more mature, to not pull out his phone to check the time. "Should we grab lunch or do you not want to eat before your strenuous murder workout?"

"If I eat maybe I won't want to murder."

"I hear that from a lot of defendants. 'It's not my fault I killed him, I didn't have time for breakfast.'"

"Not guilty by reason of hangriness?"

Adam flashes her a quick smile before he signs out of his email and turns off his monitor. "Let's grab Gansey while we're at it."

"Sure," Blue says, and maybe spending time with Ronan is tuning Adam's ear for aggression, because he can hear the odd note in her tone.

He fixes his stare on her, the one that's made countless conversational partners lose their train of thought and made his law school mentor tell him to go into litigation and made his father declare _that boy is unnatural_.

But Blue is made of sterner stuff than a good ninety-nine percent of the people Adam has ever met, so she just sticks her chin out stubbornly and says, "that way if I do still feel like killing someone, he'll be right there."

"Everything okay with you two?"

She fixes him with a stare of her own. He wouldn't say it's as intimidating as his, but it's pretty good. "I know that _you_ , Adam Parrish, are not trying to start a conversation about _feelings_. Which leaves me wondering what you do think you're doing."

"Strategic assessment. If you and Gansey blow up I'm going to get hit by shrapnel."

Blue sighs. "No shrapnel. Satisfied?"

"Yes, except you haven't answered my question." She crooks an eyebrow at him. "Are we grabbing Gansey or do you want to avoid him?"

"Fine," Blue says, surprising him. He'd mostly asked for the sake of having the last word. "Let's do that."

Gansey is just as happy as ever to follow them to lunch. It makes Adam think that whatever the impending disaster is, it's either all in Blue's head, or -- more likely -- Gansey hasn't noticed it yet.

He thinks about pulling his friend aside and warning him that his future as ♥ _Mr. Richard Sargent_ ♥ is in jeopardy, but then Gansey says, "so, tell me all about Ronan," and Adam's sympathy vanishes like a mirage.

"You've known him longer than I have. I don't know what you think I can tell you that you don't know."

Gansey waves expressively, which is a dangerous thing to do with a burrito in hand. "No, I mean, you and Ronan. Together. You never told me how you met."

Adam looks pointedly at Blue, because he never told her about his fake-boyfriend, and he's not particularly worried that Blue "death to everyone who isn't an intersectional feminist" Sargent is going to give a damn but it would be nice if Gansey at least _noticed_ he'd just outed Adam.

But he doesn't, because _Gansey_ , and honestly Blue doesn't look like she noticed either, presumably because _Gansey_.

So Adam says, blank, "we live in the same building."

"Oh, I mean, I know that. But then what?"

Adam blinks at Gansey. He is giving Gansey the full-blown unnatural Parrish stare, and Gansey is grinning back at him, salsa smudged on the corner of his mouth.

"He's pretty noticeable," Adam says eventually, for lack of anything better to say.

"Imagine that." Blue says. "Noticing someone and then asking them out on a date."

Gansey flinches.

Adam can _see_ his love life vanishing from Gansey's mind. He's so grateful that he could kiss Blue, except for how that would ruin everything for everyone.

"Oh -- of course," Gansey recovers, "but there are other considerations beyond attraction."

"Oh, of course," Blue snipes. "Such as?"

"Well -- it's important to keep in mind -- " Gansey shoots Adam a look of desperation. Adam shakes his head tersely. He is no longer grateful. Third wheeling a not-couple that refuses to admit they're dating is starting to look a lot better compared to third-wheeling a not-couple that refuses to admit they're fighting.

"There's a lot of factors to keep in mind before starting a relationship," Gansey settles on. "You need to be sure that your life can accommodate the other person -- "

Adam wraps up his lunch.

Blue fixes Gansey with her stare, and it turns out Adam was wrong; her stare is way scarier than his, at least to aristocratic Yale alumni.

" _Right_ ," she says. "You wouldn't want to make a _bad decision_."

Adam slides out of his chair and walks out of the restaurant. He doubts either Blue or Gansey notice.

-

There's an enormous box waiting for Adam when he gets home -- parts for the Mustang -- so his hands are full and he doesn't shut the door behind him right away.

He sets the box down and turns.

Ronan's standing in the doorway.

Adam jumps. He immediately regrets it; he just handed Ronan a perfect opportunity to give him shit for being a scaredy cat. As though anyone wouldn't have jumped at a hulking tattooed menace appearing behind them without a sound, accompanied by a raven. He looks like some art student's modern interpretation of a grim reaper.

"Yeah?" Adam asks, after Ronan fails to either make fun of Adam or explain his presence.

"I need you to drive me somewhere and not say a fucking word."

Adam spread his hands out and shrugs: _where?_

Ronan scowls, like he's mad he can't complain about Adam breaking his no-talking rule. "Impound lot."

Adam grins. "Yeah, no, I can't do that."

"You can't just sit here working another fucking night in a row. You're going to turn into the most boring person alive."

Adam is oddly touched that Ronan does not already consider him the most boring person alive.

But not touched enough not to be a jackass.

"I can drive you, no problem. But I am not going to keep my mouth shut."

Ronan glares at him.

"It's almost like I told you this was going to happen."

Adam thought Ronan had been glaring before. Clearly he was wrong.

"What are you waiting for? Let's go," Adam says cheerfully. "But the bird stays here."

He knows he's made a mistake as soon as Ronan smirks. That is never, ever going to be a good sign, not when it's at Adam's expense.

Ronan brushes his hand over the shoulder the raven is perched on. She takes off, flying into Adam's apartment.

Adam sighs. " _Outside_."

Ronan feigns innocence. It's a disturbing look on him. "You said _here_."

Adam tries his damnedest not to react, even as the raven flies a loop around his apartment. She settles in the bathroom, the farthest point from the door.

He entertains a vision of what it would be like to try to chase a wild bird out of his apartment while Ronan watches. Then he suppresses a shudder and shuts the bathroom door. It's ceramic and linoleum in there; easier to clean bird crap off of than his carpet or blankets.

He's half-expecting a protest, but Ronan just watches, pensive. Maybe _I locked your raven in my bathroom_ balances out _I got my car towed because I didn't listen to you and now I need your help to bail it out._

Except, no, it ought to balance out _I deliberately unleashed my raven in your apartment_. Adam has the high ground here.

He shakes his head and smiles crookedly, not caring if Ronan doesn't know what it means, if Ronan can't tell that Adam is readjusting his mental arithmetic. Because he suspects that the ratio of Ronan's infractions to Adam's has to be a lot higher than two-to-one before Adam has the high ground.

He doesn't mind so much. Something tells him that Ronan isn't keeping track of his debts.

"All right, I'm supposed to be mutely driving you somewhere?" Adam forces his face to look annoyed, for the sake of the thing.

Ronan's smirk fades, enough to tell Adam he isn't fooled. "Yeah, and you suck at it."

"As much as you suck at parking?" though they have to walk half a mile to get to Adam's car, so maybe risking the tow isn't such a bad idea after all.

As soon as Adam unlocks his door Ronan slides into the passenger seat of the Mustang and runs his hands over the dashboard, sensual and proprietary. Like the car has come into his possession and he's checking to make sure it's up to his standards.

He must be satisfied with it, because he leans back in his seat and watches Adam drive, like Adam has also come into his possession. That must be a more complicated evaluation; he keeps looking over, jury still deliberating.

Adam shifts into third, winces when the Mustang makes that weird grinding noise it always does when he shifts into third. He knows that Ronan caught the noise, and the wince, and he thinks that probably counts against him.

"Shouldn't you be driving something slick and new?"

"If you're going to drive a classic, Mustang's a good choice," Adam says, knowing it's an indirect answer. "There's a lot of spare parts out there, you can do repairs pretty easily."

"And you wanted a collector's item." Ronan's intonation is completely flat, but Adam can't shake the idea that it's a question, not a statement.

He could say yes. It wouldn't be that odd; most of the associates and the partners drive new, shiny toys, but not all of them. Gansey has a beast of a Camaro that Ronan has surely seen. But Adam's reasons are not the same as Gansey's reasons, not the same as the firm partner who drives his '57 Bel Air to the office on Fridays and chews out the valets before he even hands the keys over. And right then, Adam wants Ronan to understand.

"No," he admits, "my old boss sold it to me cheap. He'd buy junkers off people sometimes and fix them up. He gave me a deal on this one when I went off to college 'cause I did most of the work on it."

Ronan runs his thumb along his jaw, thoughtful. He's looking out the windshield now. "Weird life trajectory."

"I could say the same for you." If anyone looked at the two of them now and guessed which of them went to a fancy boarding school and which of them was born in a trailer, they'd get it wrong.

Like he knows what Adam is thinking, Ronan says, "no one ever expected anything from me," but it's offered so freely and easily that he aches to hear it.

"Yeah," Adam says, "me neither," and he knows that his own pain and bitterness leak through, but there's nothing he can do to stop it.

Ronan taps on the window with his knuckles. "We showed them."

Adam huffs a breath, close enough to a laugh to surprise himself. The strangeness of the moment he's living hits him all at once: that this is a collision of two lives traveling on very different paths, starting far apart and heading far apart and only coexisting by chance.

Only chance. Only a moment. And then it isn't funny anymore. It stings, suddenly, to realize that the man in the seat next to him is a flash of light across a mirror, a shadow from a passing car; complementary scars and chips in their shoulders and a bone-deep sense of recognition -- but because of their very nature, they won't stay in proximity for long.

Adam drives, and breathes, and he doesn't think anymore.

Ronan gets bored, digs through the glove compartment, messes with the window crank, changes the radio station and then changes it again three seconds later.

Adam gives in after the tenth station in sixty seconds, shoves Ronan's hand away from the dial and switches it over to NPR.

Ronan reaches for the volume knob and turns it as high as it will go, so that they roll into the impound lot with Fresh Air blaring out the passenger side window.

Ronan says something to him, but between the radio and his bad ear he can't make it out.

Adam looks over. The light coming in through the windows has turned Ronan's face strange and haunting, all shadows and contrast and sharp lines.

Adam thinks, _oh_.

It isn't new information. Ronan has always been attractive, even when he was _that weird guy who keeps a carrion bird as a pet_. There had to be a reason that Ronan was the first person who came to mind when Adam was scrambling for a fake boyfriend.

But it catches him off-guard tonight, the intensity in Ronan's eyes, the hard angles of his body, and it knocks something loose in Adam. Some knowledge he hadn't had before, of how easy it would be to kiss him. He could just lean over the gearshift, press his mouth against Ronan's, swipe his tongue against Ronan's lips and -- 

Except he _can't_ , because they _aren't dating_. This is all a show for Gansey's benefit, and at some point the show will -- end. They'll tell Gansey they broke up, and that will be that. Ronan will go back to being the weird neighbor Adam glimpses through windows, and soon they won't even be neighbors anymore, and that's fine. That's what he'd asked for.

Ronan gets out of the car.

Adam grips the steering wheel hard. He's distantly aware of Ronan hassling the guy at the impound desk, leaning against the chain link fence in a dramatic show of impatience, finally retrieving his car and getting behind the wheel.

He honks at Adam and drives his BMW a little too close to the Mustang, a little too fast. Adam's not mad about that; he's too busy scrambling to throw the car back in gear, to _get the hell out of here_ before he loses any more time to his little fugue of self-pity.

He turns the radio to a reasonable volume. Tries to pay attention to Terry Gross. Realizes as he parks that he doesn't even know who she's interviewing.

He allows himself one whispered " _fuck_ " and then he puts it behind him. Gets out of the car. Doesn't slam the door shut. Doesn't sprint across the street. Doesn't flinch away from his customary glance through the window to check on Ronan -- lights off, no sign of him. Maybe he's in Pasadena, maybe he's out getting laid, and none of it matters because Adam has no claim to him and never did.

He thinks he's doing a pretty good job of holding it together until he opens the door to his bathroom and gets a faceful of pissed off raven.

She explodes out of the door at him, and he wheels back so fast that he falls backwards on his ass, banging his elbows on the ground hard. He swears. By the time he's finished with the truest words he can find to fit his mood, Ronan's demon pet has perched on the corner of his useless naked window sill, squawking at him like it's his fault she was trapped.

He pulls his body up off the ground and throws the door open, snarling " _out_ ". It doesn't help; for all she was in such a rush to go, she fluffs her feathers three times before launching back into the air and winging it outside, every bit as contrary and independent as her keeper.

Adam shuts the door as soon as she's clear of it, collapses with his back to it to keep himself upright. Shuts his eyes and _breathes_ , deeply, and when that doesn't make him feel any better he says "fuck" again.

That doesn't make him feel any better, either, but at least it's more appropriate for the moment.

The first thing he notices, when he opens his eyes, is that Ronan's window is still dark.

Damn it all to hell. He can get through this. His father didn't break him. Working three jobs at the age of sixteen didn't break him. The partners getting his name wrong while he busts his ass to get their buddies cleared of all charges didn't break him. Ronan Lynch isn't going to break him, either.

-

"You're working late."

He is, even compared to the schedule he's established over the last two months. He has been working late for the last week. The artificial light in his office is even more dismal when when it's the only light on in the whole floor. But the alternative is going home and looking at the light in Ronan's window and thinking about how _fucked_ he is.

"I should point out that that's a self-defeating argument." Adam stretches his arms and hears his shoulders crack. "Since you wouldn't know that if you weren't also working late."

"It wasn't supposed to be an argument."

"We're lawyers, everything is an argument."

Gansey frowns at him, silent for so long that Adam goes back to his computer screen.

"You've been working late a lot."

Adam shrugs, faux-casual. "Got to make partner somehow."

"You don't want to be partner."

That stings, sharp enough that Adam turns back to him. Because he hadn't told Gansey that. Because he'd had the chance to tell Gansey that, and he'd gotten a cab and gone home.

Because given the chance to tell Gansey the truth, he lied.

"Right," Adam says, and his guilt makes him nasty and hard-edged. "Because you can afford to turn your nose up at any opportunity that isn't perfect, so everyone else can, too."

Gansey takes a half-step back. "But you _don't_ have to do this. You could do anything."

For a second all Adam wants is to break something. He can picture it, clear as if he's done it already: throw his monitor at the wall, watch it splinter and crack, chase Gansey out of his office.

Adam breathes. _Get a grip, Parrish, this isn't how decent people think --_

"I don't need you to grant me your blessing, Gansey."

"That's not what I'm saying."

"Then what exactly are you saying?"

Gansey stares at him. "Nothing. I guess I'm not saying anything."

"Great," Adam mutters, and stabs at his keyboard. "Was there something else?"

"I'm going to grab dinner." Gansey hesitates. The silence slides through Adam's ear and stabs at his brain. "Do you want anything?"

"No," Adam says, and Gansey leaves him alone in his office.

Adam finishes writing the brief he's working on. Skims four journal articles. Sends a half dozen emails. Keeps going until the words on the screen blur in front of his eyes.

He rests his head on his fists, overwhelmed with the thought that he doesn't want to be here. That he doesn't want to be anywhere.

Except -- no, that isn't quite right.

He doesn't turn off his computer when he leaves. He'll be back soon enough.

Gansey's office is dark and empty when he walks by.

The light is on in Ronan's apartment. Adam dashes up the stairs. It reminds him of that first time, charging up with a handle of vodka and his heart pounding in his throat. And like the first time, if he stops he'll talk himself out of it.

Ronan is sitting on the couch, headphones on, so Adam knocks on the window instead of the door. Ronan either sees him or hears him, because he sets his laptop down and walks over to the window, slides it open.

"Yeah?"

"Can I come in?"

Ronan steps to the side, gestures with one hand, _after you_.

Adam puts his hands on the window sill and hops over it.

Ronan watches him. Adam is certain of two facts: that Ronan is not going to force him to talk, and that anything he said right now would be the wrong thing.

So he doesn't talk. He sits on the couch, the opposite end from where Ronan's laptop is perched. Ronan sits right back where Adam found him, putting his headphones on and going back to work. Another incomprehensible movie plays on the television. Adam glances at it briefly -- animation, flat and hideous -- and then looks back at Ronan.

Ronan's attention is entirely on his work. His focus is hypnotic, his expressions enormous, unbound. Adam can tell, without knowing what Ronan is working on, exactly how it's going at any moment: poorly at first, and then slightly better, until Ronan is pleased with it in spite of himself.

Adam sits, and watches, and doesn't talk, and soaks up the feeling of not working, not failing, not screwing up, not being alone.

He stays far later than he should, until he can't keep his eyes open anymore.

A hand jostles his knee and he jerks awake. No idea how long he'd been asleep. The television is off and Ronan has pulled his headphones down around his neck.

Adam stands up. "Thanks." There isn't anything else to say.

Ronan nods at him, and Adam jumps back over the window sill.

Ronan doesn't shut the window behind him. He's already back at work.

-

Adam has never shrunk from doing the necessary thing, no matter how much it asked of him. And this is such a small thing, comparatively -- he'll seek Gansey out first thing, apologize for snapping, endure whatever probing questions Gansey has for him about his mental state. It's nothing he can't do.

Gansey isn't in his office the next morning.

Adam checks four times, pours four cups of coffee as an excuse for getting up from his desk. Drinks three and a half of them before he realizes he forgot to eat breakfast. He swallows down his nausea and finishes the last cup; the damage is already done.

Gansey doesn't appear until well after lunch (iced tea and half a Snickers bar), pawing through the piles on his desk when Adam sticks his head in the office and knocks on the open door.

"Parrish!" Gansey's face brightens, then immediately dims. Adam wishes he'd been able to get any solid food down. "How can I help you?"

"Just stopped by to chat. You're in late." Adam wants to wince at the words, at the echo of last night's conversation, but it's out there and he can't take it back.

"Deposition in the Addison case," Gansey says. _Right,_ that wasn't one of Adam's, but he'd helped Gansey prep for it enough to know that it must have been a nightmare. Christ, his timing sucks, but what else is new.

"Finished already?"

Gansey scrubs at his eyelids, pushing his glasses halfway up his forehead. "Continued to tomorrow. Sorry, my brain's half off -- what did you need?"

"I won't take up your time. I just wanted to say -- I shouldn't have snapped last night." That isn't sufficient, and he hates to swallow his pride; but there's a class of man who never apologizes, no matter how in the wrong he is, and he hates more to fall into that class. "I'm sorry, it was rude of me."

Gansey looks at him for a second. If Adam hadn't seen how dead Gansey looked before he saw Adam, he'd feel defeated.

As it is -- it's not very encouraging.

"No, no, the fault is mine," Gansey says, and Adam can see him pulling his public, presentable face on over the drained shell of his self. "It wasn't my place to comment."

"Well," Adam says, and pauses. His hand is still on the door. He has gotten through his script; he has completed his task.

Fuck, but he should have eaten lunch.

"Sorry, I hate to be rude, but," Gansey grimaces. "I've got to translate my notes from the deposition, and, well -- "

"Yeah, I've seen how you type." Gansey's typing is nearly as bad as Adam's handwriting; words so mangled that spellcheck gives up on them, stretches of numbers and symbols because he forgets where his hands are on the keyboard, page breaks and caps lock everywhere you look. Adam has no idea how a Millennial could be so bad at _typing_ , except that Gansey is actually an old man about everything else, so why not? "I'll leave you to it." He steps away from the door, but something -- his body's attempt to ensure he gets some nutrition at some point, probably -- urges him to poke his head back inside. "Let's do lunch tomorrow? Or, day after," he corrects. "You can fill me in on the deposition from hell."

"Sure." Gansey smiles at him. Adam smiles back.

If only he didn't feel so damn sick.

-

Ronan's window is dark when Adam gets home, even though he forced himself out of the office early enough to get caught in the logjam of cars leaving the parking garage (and, technically, to get stuck in rush hour traffic, but that isn't a meaningful distinction if traffic starts getting "bad" around one-thirty in the afternoon and stays bad well past nine o'clock at night, which it does). Just as well; Adam crashes from all of the caffeine leaving his bloodstream in one fell swoop. He falls asleep at his minuscule dining table and drools all over his witness statements. He's disgruntled and disgusted enough when he wakes that he gives up trying to make any progress and goes to bed, though once here's there he finds that sleep eludes him.

He stumbles over Ronan the next morning, lying on his back in the courtyard. In order, he thinks: _shit, he's dead_ , and _did he sleep out here last night?_ and then, when he sees that Ronan's eyes are wide open, staring straight up at the sky, _does he know what time it is?_

None of those words pass his lips, though, because of the expression on Ronan's face. It leaves him -- small, and silent, and unsure, so he does the only thing he can think to do. Which is, apparently, to head up his stairs and come back down a minute later.

Ronan lifts his head an inch off the ground and squints at Adam when the pillow hits his stomach. It makes Adam feel better about throwing the Advil and the energy drink at him. Ronan catches both in the air. Shakes half a dozen pills into his hand and downs them all at once. Tosses the bottle back at Adam while cracking the can open with his other hand.

Adam doesn't ask why Ronan is lying on the ground. Ronan doesn't ask why Adam is assaulting him with a care package.

He tucks the pillow under his head and tells the sky, "life fucking sucks."

"No shit," Adam says, and heads to work.

He doesn't walk out of the way to Gansey's office, even when it's late enough in the day that the deposition could be over -- and when he realizes he's thinking that, he leaves the building all together.

Adam's only home long enough to strip off his shirt before Ronan lets himself in. Adam's fault, for not locking the door; there had been a window of time between feeling comfortable around Ronan and realizing that he absolutely couldn't feel comfortable around Ronan, and as brief a time as that had been it had been long enough for Adam to learn bad habits.

At least he's wearing pants.

Ronan chucks the pillow at him, mute. A quick sniff test reveals that the case is freshly laundered: another data point, and Adam doesn't yet have a full rubric of what Ronan's idiosyncratic etiquette will and won't allow, but the shape of it is coming into view.

"Did you convince Dick that you're not dying?" Ronan asks.

Adam must have relaxed when Ronan threw him the pillow, but he only realizes it because the question sends his shoulders back up around his ears. "What do you mean?"

"It's been a whole day since he sent me a freaked out text about how you're going to work yourself to death."

"I didn't know he had you spying on me for him," Adam bites.

Ronan stares back at him, silent and heavy. His comment is too stupid to deserve an answer.

Heat creeps up Adam's neck. Embarrassment, and it's turning to anger, because that's a curse that Adam comes by honestly, that most things turn to anger sooner or later.

He turns around with an abrupt jerk. Hates showing his back, but he needs to do something. His hands reach out and grab a t-shirt, mostly without him telling them to.

"Yeah, well, you can tell him I'm fine." Adam tugs the shirt over his head, temporarily blind. "What does he even care for."

When he turns around again, Ronan is looking at him like he's covered in muck. "He cares because you're his friend, asshole."

"He's got a lot of those."

"No," Ronan says. "He doesn't."

"Right, it's not like he befriends everyone he meets and sets up shop in their lives. If I really did work myself to death he'd replace me in a week."

"You're not an idiot," and it's too angry to be a compliment, "so what the fuck is wrong with you?"

 _There's something wrong with that boy_ , but Adam doesn't need his father's voice in his ear to piss him off; he's upset enough about his own bad behavior, about Gansey's sheer entitlement to his life, about the fact that Ronan is still looking at him like he's too disgusting to feed to the pigs.

"Nothing," Adam snarls. "Sorry I'm too busy to be the perfect social butterfly."

"You don't even fucking know him at all, do you?" Ronan steps forward, and Adam steels himself and stands his ground. "Everybody gets along with Gansey but nobody ever understands him for shit. He's _lonely_ as hell."

Adam clenches his jaw.

He thought, until now, that he'd ended up in this mess because he doesn't know how to date someone.

It hurts so much worse to admit, even just to himself, that he doesn't know how to be someone's friend.

And Ronan is still tearing into him, "He thinks you're different, I've only been hearing him talk about you for months -- "

The implication of those words hits Adam so hard it forces him back a step; back another step when his self-recrimination sets in. _Should have known, should have guessed_ \-- "You knew? You two were talking about me the whole time -- "

Ronan rolls his eyes. "I didn't know he was talking about my sad loner neighbor," and Adam's face flushes, for all that he knows his own judgment of Ronan wouldn't pass scrutiny. _Because_ his judgment of Ronan wouldn't pass scrutiny. "I just knew he met someone he thought really got him. Guess he was wrong."

He's moving again before Adam can think of any way to respond; it's only the door slamming shut that jars him into action. He crosses the room in three quick strides and then falls still again.

One hand on the knob, ready to open the door; the other hand resting on the frame, to keep it shut.

He locks the door.

Adam walks back, slower than he'd crossed the room, and lies down on the bed, behind the screen. The only place in the room that offers any privacy, the only place in the room that he can't see out his damn window. He never had fixed the blinds; he'd told himself he was too busy. He wasn't, though. He'd left them broken because he'd _liked_ it, hadn't he, watching Ronan across the way. Even after he knew how fucked he was, he'd liked catching those glimpses. Liked the idea of leaving an opening into his life.

God, he's an idiot, and a masochist, and he's going to fix the damn blinds first thing in the morning.

But as he sighs and shoves his face against the pillow, breathing in the scent of unfamiliar detergent, he thinks no, no that isn't the first thing he needs to do.

-

"So, it was brought to my attention that I've been an asshole."

Gansey looks up, startled, but understanding dawns quick enough. "Ronan?"

"Yes," Adam says, shutting Gansey's office door behind him. "Though I'm ashamed it took someone else pointing it out to me." He runs a hand over his face. Now that he's started he can get through this, on momentum if nothing else, but that doesn't mean it's easy. "I should have realized for myself."

"No, you're fine." The answer is immediate; Gansey didn't have to think about it. He really doesn't blame Adam for anything.

"I'm not, though." The sheer irony of having to argue that he does deserve blame; the hardest part, because of all of the trip wires in his psyche he's having to dance around. The easiest part, because he's always put the blame on himself in the end. "This isn't just about the other night. The truth is, I haven't been acting like I value you, and, I do."

Gansey is so thunderstruck that it's hard to look at him. Adam looks anyway. Fixes the moment in his mind for the next time he underestimates his friend. Wonders how many of the people in Gansey's circle have ever told him _I value you_.

"So I was already feeling off-balance," he continues. "Guilty. The other night, and then you...stumbled over some of my issues and I overreacted. I'm sorry."

"It's already forgiven," and the devil of it is, it _is_. Forgiven, but not forgotten, maybe, because Gansey lowers his voice; he's learned some hesitation around Adam, and it's not such a relief, after all. "Is there anything I can help with?"

Adam shakes his head. "I'm good at working through these things on my own, I'll survive." Weirdly, his mind calls up the scent of Ronan's detergent, the sight of Ronan lying on dead grass, _life fucking sucks_. "Though I'm starting to think survival isn't the best goal."

Gansey smiles at him, warmth more than joy. "We should do something fun."

Deadpan, Adam says, "we could go to a museum."

"The Getty newsletter informs me that they have a travelling exhibit on Roman mosaics," and academic-stuffy-Gansey is a thousand times better than easy-charming-Gansey, "but I do realize that you're only poking fun at me." He brightens. "Oh! There's a new sushi restaurant in Sawtelle, it's supposed to be exquisite."

Adam doesn't care either way, doesn't jump to _new restaurant_ when he's thinking of fun things to do any more easily than he jumps to _museum_ , except -- well, when was the last time he tried to think of a fun thing to do?

"Let's do that," and that doesn't feel like enough, so after a moment's hesitation he adds, "You know I never had sushi until law school? I was twenty-three and I'd never had sushi before." It's such a minor contribution, the tiniest thing he could give, but it's the first personal fact he's ever offered up freely to Gansey. Start small, and maybe at some point it gets easier. "Pretty pathetic, right?"

"Not at all," and they're not talking about sushi. Gansey beams like he knows exactly what Adam means, and Adam smiles, because yeah, he does.

"I'll text Blue, we can make it a double date."

"Oh God," Adam says, " _tell_ me that's finally official."

"She did not appreciate my attempting to make decisions on her behalf," and there's a wary shell-shocked note in his voice that tells Adam 'didn't appreciate' is an understatement. "But she did appreciate that my intentions were good. And then she told me to stop being an idiot and go out with her."

"Good." Adam remembers that night out in the desert, cold sand and faith. "You deserve someone who makes you happy."

And then Gansey says: "You should invite Ronan, you'll see him before I will."

 _I will_ , Adam thinks, not letting his smile slip, _and I might just wish I didn't._

-

Ronan takes the whole thing extremely well, if Adam grades on a curve.

"This is going to fucking _suck_."

"You don't have to go," Adam says. It's beyond time for this charade to die. He already owes Ronan more than he can ever repay him, and maybe Gansey won't be upset about it. No -- Gansey definitely won't be upset, or only at the thought that Adam hadn't trusted him, and Adam is already committed to fixing that.

Ronan sighs theatrically and leans against the side of his door. He hadn't invited Adam in, which after their argument didn't surprise him; but he had opened the door when Adam knocked, and not just to tell him to fuck off, which did. "Might as well get it over with. Shit. You haven't seen Gansey in a relationship, this is going to be nauseating."

Adam blinks as realization dawns: Ronan is not afraid of their deception being uncovered. And of course not; Ronan doesn't do _fear_ , not over anything so minor as this. He's just expressing an honest expectation that he won't have a good time.

But the weight of Adam's debt is sitting heavy on his shoulders, and he makes one last attempt to make a small repayment.

"You don't have to go," Adam says again, "with me."

Ronan eyes him coolly, and then says, "Don't be stupid."

Adam nods once -- invitation issued and accepted -- and then he goes down the stairs and back across to his apartment to fix the blinds.

For all that Ronan claims to dread their double date, he drags Adam out of his apartment as soon as he gets home the next day, so that they show up at the restaurant half an hour early.

They don't talk. The silence is more comfortable than Adam expects; now and then someone will walk by who looks _very Los Angeles_ and Ronan will flick his eyes over to Adam to share his unspoken derision. It feels better than it should, to be on the same side, even for something so petty.

Gansey shows up fifteen minutes early. Adam hasn't ascertained how long he and Blue have been an official item, but it can't be long if Gansey is still showing up fifteen minutes early to impress her. On the other hand, maybe that's just how Gansey is.

Ronan pulls him aside, all dark looks and menacing body language. "You better not be fucking sappy," and they make a hilarious image, Ronan looming and glowering and Gansey just pleased as Punch to see him. Adam hadn't consciously known until this very minute how perfectly right they were together, ravens and Yale and all. "I swear to God if this is Henry Cheng all over again, we're leaving and we're taking your car."

 _Henry?_ Adam wonders, and Gansey is already answering, "that's not a fair comparison to make, everyone gets carried away in their first relationship," so Adam's attempt to gay-panic Gansey had been doomed from the start, and really, why does he bother being surprised at any of his plans going awry.

Once the date starts, though, Ronan is very well-behaved -- again, adjusting for it being Ronan. He declares war on Blue the second he lays eyes on her, somehow communicating this and receiving a reciprocal declaration without either of them saying a word. He pretty much only speaks to call Blue a series of nicknames which start with "runt" and get more offensive from there, and to tell embarrassing stories about Gansey. This includes reciting from memory a painfully earnest poem that had been written about the aforementioned Henry Cheng, which makes Blue and Adam laugh themselves sick.

Gansey is torn between smiling and looking rueful. "No one appreciates sonnets anymore," he says, half a complaint and half a sigh, and Blue pats him on the shoulder in consolation.

Blue does not look surprised at the existence of Henry Cheng. Adam wonders how much else he's missed because of his own defensiveness. He breathes deeply and shuts his eyes, a split second longer than it takes to blink; he will do better. He has to. He _wants_ to.

When he opens his eyes, Ronan is watching him.

Adam quirks the corner of his mouth up, not quite a smile.

Ronan leans forward and steals Adam's chopsticks.

The not-quite-a-smile turns into not-quite-a-scowl, which doesn't in the least stop Ronan from tossing the chopsticks several feet across the room and stealing a fork from the next table and dropping it in front of Adam.

"I'm not _that_ hopeless."

"Tell it to the orange chicken stains on your carpet."

Adam picks up the fork and uses it to smear the entire glob of wasabi on a piece of Ronan's sushi.

Ronan eats it in one bite.

"Damn," Blue says, admiration obvious in spite of herself. "Hardcore."

Gansey flags down the waiter to ask for more water.

Ronan doesn't show any outward signs of distress, except that his hand, resting on top of Adam's on the table, curls to grip his fingers tightly.

It isn't the first time Ronan's touched him. It isn't anything to read into.

Except that Ronan _keeps touching him_. Nudges him with an elbow when he gets distracted and misses Gansey addressing him; puts a hand over his mouth when he starts to answer a question Blue asks him and glares at her, "no lawyer talk." Settles an arm over his shoulders while they're waiting for the check, slides his hand down to his back as they all stand to leave, and Adam's leaning into the touch before he can think better of it.

There's some talk of finding a bar, a club, a cup of gelato, but Adam shakes his head, tired and buzzing with energy at the same time; nothing sounds right. They end up walking Blue to her car instead, a bizarre parade of chaperones she insists she doesn't need and Ronan insists she does since otherwise a bat might mistake her tiny obnoxious form for a mosquito and eat her. Blue presses her lips against Gansey's cheek, and then Adam's, and then pops up on her tiptoes to give Ronan a theatrically wet _smack_ that makes him recoil in horror, so Adam decides that Blue's won the first battle of the war.

Blue drives off, and Gansey offers to share his Uber. But they're only two miles from the apartment and it's a nice night; Adam declines in favor of walking, and Ronan follows unquestioningly. His hand dangles by his side, occasionally brushing against Adam's; every time it does it sends a jolt up Adam's arm, makes him think about things he shouldn't.

And then he thinks about all of the ways his own defenses have blinded him already, walls too high for him to see over.

They're still a half a mile from home when he puts it together:

"Oh my God, we're dating."

"Yeah, I know."

"No," Adam insists, "but we're _dating_."

Ronan shoots him a look from the corner of his eye. "Did you hit your head?"

Adam stops walking, forces Ronan to stop and face him. "You didn't tell me!"

Ronan looks at him, bewildered. "You asked me out and I said yes."

"I asked you to pretend."

"And I told you I wasn't going to fake it."

"Why would you say yes?" Adam asks. "You didn't even know me!"

"You were cute and weird and you bought me vodka. I wanted to figure out what the hell your deal was."

Adam's heart pounds, loud enough he can hardly hear his own voice. "And?"

"And what?"

"Have you figured out what my deal is?"

"Yeah," Ronan says. "Have you?"

Adam breathes. Thinks about everything that has led him here, to a life epiphany on the sidewalk across the street from the fucking strip club by the freeway exit of all damn places; his timing really is shit. Thinks about the job he hates and the apartment he settled for, thinks about the friendships he lucked into and very nearly threw away. Thinks about looking through windows. Thinks about being seen.

He says, "I think I'm getting there."

Ronan brushes a finger through Adam's hair, across his forehead, and Adam tilts his face up.

"I can't believe you thought I was just going on dates with you so you could save face with Gansey," Ronan grumbles. "I don't like you that much."

"But you like me enough to go on dates with me _for the sake of going on dates with me_?"

The mulish look on Ronan's face says that he is absolutely not going to own up to that. "You're all right."

There's no reason for that to flood Adam through with warmth, except that it does, and he's sick of fighting things that are, more sick of fighting things he wants.

"You knew we were dating this whole time," he says slowly, "and you never said anything?"

"I didn't figure I needed to explain it to you," but his voice is unbearably fond.

Adam bites his lip. "You never tried to kiss me, either."

Ronan looks offended.

"I'm a _gentleman_ , Parrish. I was waiting for the right moment."

Adam laughs. Because Ronan thinks he's a gentleman. Because he's not wrong about that. Because it really is just that simple. Because he is overflowing with happiness and there's nothing else for him to do.

Or almost nothing.

"I don't know if this is the right moment or not," Adam says, "but I'm going to kiss you anyway."

Ronan slides his hand around to Adam's back again, and it feels even better when it's pulling him close, when Ronan's other hand is stroking his side, when Adam is allowed to enjoy it. 

Adam laughs, lets Ronan pull him closer. He turns his face up and kisses Ronan, even as he's smiling, wide and foolish.

"Fucking dork," Ronan says against his lips, and kisses him back, and Adam is wholly, wondrously alive.

-

Adam runs into Gansey in the elevator the next morning and exchanges a friendly nod with him; he figures conversation can wait for the first cup of coffee.

Except Gansey keeps _looking_ at him. He's trying not to get caught, but Gansey possesses all of the subtlety of a bridge collapse.

"Is something going on?"

"No, no, nothing at all." Gansey waves airily at him as they exit the elevator, and then immediately steers him toward the supply closet.

"This strikes me as outside the bounds of _nothing at all_ ," Adam says. "I don't want to make Blue jealous, I'm betting she's vindictive when she's got a grudge."

"What? No, I just wanted to talk to you. Privately."

"We have offices," Adam points out.

"This was closer."

Adam is torn between laughing and sighing. He doesn't react at all; he can't regret something he didn't do.

"Look, there was a weird vibe last night," Gansey says, somber as the grave. For all that Adam knows this must be important he can't figure out what the hell they're talking about until Gansey adds, "with you and Ronan. Is everything okay?"

 _Now_ Gansey thinks something is off about Adam and his boyfriend; it would be impossible not to laugh except that Adam is also very quietly freaking the hell out.

"Yeah, everything's fine." How much of the truth does he owe Gansey, exactly? What _is_ the truth? He and Ronan have been dating for twelve hours; they've been dating for three weeks.

What does he _want_ the truth to be?

Adam says, "I didn't realize that Ronan was -- as serious as he is, that's all."

"Oh," Gansey replies, so very, very carefully. "Is that a problem?"

Translation: _are you about to dump my best friend_ , and Adam's answering, "no," before he can even think about it. "No, it's not a problem." He wants to duck his head, turn away, fight down the smile that the ghost of Ronan's hand on his back conjures up -- but he doesn't. It's okay if Gansey knows he's happy. It's allowed. "We're good."

Gansey grins back at him. "I'm glad. I mean, he never talks to me about these things, let alone in any kind of detail -- "

"Gansey," Adam interrupts. He's been ducking and dodging and evading Gansey's questions for so long that his stamina has finally run out, abandoned him between boxes of toner and stacks of empty binders, and there's nothing for it but to face the conversation head on. "No offense, but that's as much as I want to talk to you about my relationship."

"Oh -- " Gansey blinks, thrown for a second, and then he smiles sheepishly. "Of course, I'm sorry." He clears his throat, casting about for a change of subject, and it's endearing how obvious he is about it. "Hey, did you hear about Newell?

"Not more prostitutes," Adam groans, leading the way out of the supply closet.

" _Three_ prostitutes," Gansey confirms.

"God, why the hell do we defend these guys?"

"I'm making a good faith effort so that I can say I tried practicing the law and I'd rather study it." Gansey looks at Adam a second and adds, careful again, "I don't really know why you're here."

Adam opens the door to his office and nods Gansey in. Shuts the door behind him. Takes his time discarding his jacket and turning on the computer.

But he knows what he needs to do, and he's never shrunk from doing the necessary thing.

Sometimes, it doesn't even hurt.

"I want to learn how defense attorneys think so I can switch over to the prosecutor's office and use their secrets and their money to destroy them."

Gansey looks taken aback; either at Adam's answer, or at the fact that he answered at all. Adam vows to do something about one of those. "That's -- rather bloodthirsty of you, but I guess I'm not surprised."

Adam goes through the rest of the conversation, the rest of the _day_ , terribly bemused.

More than one person comments on his attitude. "Just having a good day," he tells them all, and leaves it at that until he's sprawled out on Ronan's couch, his head on Ronan's lap.

"Apparently that's all it would have taken." He's not laughing, exactly, but he can hear the humor in his own voice. "I just had to say, please drop it, and it would have been over."

Ronan tangles his fingers in Adam's hair. "I'm glad you suck at it."

Adam shuts his eyes and smiles. "Yeah. Me too."

-

It turns out that Los Angeles does get cold in winter if your walls are paper thin, and that there are limits to even their negligent landlord's tolerance for profanity displayed in the windows, and that the rent on a decent one-bedroom is not substantially more than the rent on two shitty bachelor apartments.

Adam has a parking space and a kitchen that's so well-stocked he doesn't know what to do with it and curtains on every window.

It is, finally, a place he's not ashamed to call home. 

There are piles of boxes to unpack and change of address forms to fill out and instead of doing any of the hundred things he needs to do Adam sits on the couch and presses his face against Ronan's, takes in the warmth of his skin, the familiar smell of him, the huff of his breath. Because he is Ronan, and he isn't tucked behind glass, and he isn't an eternal mystery, and he isn't beyond Adam's reach.

"Let's go out tonight," Adam says.

Ronan sighs, but he's already grabbing his jacket.

Adam takes his hand and drags him out into the world.

**Author's Note:**

> [This is fuzzy duckling, btw.](http://www.behr.com/consumer/ColorDetailView/P270-5) 
> 
> I had a bit in here where Adam is cold and Ronan gives him his jacket, and then I remembered this is set in Los Angeles in August and I cut it because no one has ever been cold in August in the history of Los Angeles, so I don't want any of you to ever say that I'm not an Artist who doesn't make Sacrifices for Truth.
> 
> If you like this fic you can [reblog it on tumblr.](http://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/167196678490/while-were-on-the-subject-could-we-change-the)


End file.
